Influence of personality, cognition, and hearing loss on the association of real-world listening conditions with self-reported listening effort and heart rate

More studies are fulfilling the need to investigate listening effort in individuals with hearing loss in everyday life, and their outcomes have shown that there is a link between ambient acoustics and subjective and objective measures of listening effort. Individual characteristics presumably play an important role in which activities a listener chooses to participate in during daily life. However, no studies have investigated how individual characteristics influence the association between ambient acoustics and indices of listening effort in everyday life. To address this, the present study investigated whether personality traits, cognitive ability, and degree of hearing loss affect the association of ambient acoustics with self-reported listening effort and heart rate. Sixty-seven hearing aid users participated in a four-week field trial, where sound pressure level and signal-to-noise ratio were logged every 20 seconds by the participants’ own hearing aids, and heart rate was recorded continuously via Empatica EmbracePlus wristbands. Listening effort was rated via an ecological momentary assessment smartphone app. Personality traits, cognitive ability, and degree of hearing loss were assessed using the NEO Five-Factor Inventory-3, the Intelligenz-Struktur-Test 2000, and pure tone audiometry respectively. Outcomes of linear mixed effects models showed that higher conscientiousness and degree of hearing loss were associated with higher self-reported listening effort with increasing sound pressure level. Additionally, higher conscientiousness and lower cognitive ability were associated with higher heart rate with increasing signal-to-noise ratio. This study underscores the importance of considering individual characteristics when translating research to real-world contexts and optimizing hearing loss rehabilitation in clinical practice.