Descriptions of Hearing Aids Influence the Experience of Listening to Hearing Aids

Objectives: Experiences can be strongly influenced by expectations. In hearing healthcare, previous studies have shown that descriptions of hearing aids or contextual factors during the hearing aid fitting process can change subjective and even objective outcomes with hearing aids via the placebo effect. Personality factors have also been shown to affect susceptibility to placebo effects. The purposes of the present study were to (a) investigate the effects of communicating narratives designed to foster positive, negative, or neutral expectations about hearing aids on short-term patient outcomes, and (b) to determine if the degree to which the narratives affected end-user outcomes could be predicted by personality factors.

Design: Nineteen adults between the ages of 54 and 81 (mean age = 68.5, SD = 8.9) had 3 separate research appointments, each exposing them to a different narrative condition: positive, negative, or neutral. the appointment was designed to look and feel like a "traditional" hearing aid fitting appointment, during which the experimenter introduced (i.e., the narrative condition) and fit a pair of hearing aids, the participant was asked to provide their initial feedback about the hearing aids, and the participant performed speech-in-noise testing. Unbeknownst to the research participant, the hearing aids fitted at all three appointments were the same, and the only difference between the three appointments was the way the hearing aids were described to the participants.

Results: The results of this study showed that communication of a positive narrative about hearing aids before a hearing aid fitting led to better speech-in-noise performance on the QuickSIN as compared with performance following the negative or neutral narrative conditions. Also, the positive narrative led to the perception that acclimatization to the hearing aids would occur faster than the negative or neutral narrative conditions. Notably, the effect of communication of a positive narrative was stronger for individuals who scored higher on agreeableness, and susceptibility to positive and negative messaging was stronger for individuals low in neuroticism.

Conclusions: The study suggests that short-term evaluations of hearing aids can be strongly influenced by narratives as provided by the hearing healthcare provider at the time of a hearing aid fitting.