# The effect of moral identity on facial emotion processing in adolescents with hearing loss: an event-related potentials study

## TL;DR

This study shows that adolescents with hearing loss process facial emotions differently, especially when moral context is involved, compared to those with typical hearing.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is identifying how moral context affects emotion recognition in adolescents with hearing loss using ERP data.

## Key findings

- Adolescents with hearing loss judge low-moral faces more negatively than those with typical hearing.
- Moral context influences emotion processing in adolescents with hearing loss at both middle and late neural stages.
- Typically hearing adolescents' emotion recognition is unaffected by moral context.

## Abstract

This study investigates how the moral characters of others influence the recognition of facial emotional expressions in adolescents with hearing loss (HL), and compares these effects with those in adolescents with typical hearing (TH).

A moral priming paradigm was employed to explore the neural mechanisms underlying facial emotion perception (happy, neutral, and angry) in different moral contexts (high moral, low moral). Event-related potentials (ERP) were utilized to assess brain responses.

Adolescents with TH evaluated emotional valence independently of moral context. In contrast, adolescents with HL judged faces with low moral levels more negatively. ERP analyses showed facial expression processing in adolescents with TH was not influenced by moral information, whereas adolescents with HL exhibited moral effects during both the middle (N2) and late stages (LPP) of processing.

These findings underscore distinct neurocognitive mechanisms of emotion recognition in adolescents with HL and highlight the significant influence of moral identity on their emotional judgments.