PhD defence

Social Emotions and Social Functioning in Chinese Deaf and Hard-of- Hearing and Hearing Preschoolers

• Z. Li

Date

Friday 14 February 2025

Time

10:00 - 11:00 hour

Address

Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden

Supervisor(s)

• Prof.dr. C. Rieffe
• Prof.dr. J. Frijns
• dr. B. Li

Summary

This thesis explores how hearing loss affects preschool children’s development of social emotions. Social emotions such as shame, guilt, pride, and empathy, are learnt in social environments and are crucial to regulating children’s behaviours. Yet, deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children encounter obstacles in acquiring these social emotions, as they often miss out on information during listening to others’ speeches. To provide practical suggestions to DHH children’s education, it is important to assess their social emotions via behavioural observation and to track their social-emotional development to evaluate the influence of hearing loss on the developmental trajectories.

Our validation on parent-reports shows that shame, guilt, pride, and the distinct levels of empathy can be observed in children of preschool age. Our longitudinal studies reveal that children’s shame, guilt, pride, and prosocial behaviours develop throughout the preschool years, while hearing loss delays their social-emotional development. The thesis thus highlights the importance of early intervention for DHH children to improve DHH children’s hearing abilities, which facilitates their socialization and benefits their social-emotional development.

PhD dissertations

Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.

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