Feelings and emotions in deaf adolescents

The objective of this study is to explore the feelings and emotions of deaf adolescents. The study examines the emotional domain of 34 prelingual severely and profoundly deaf adolescents, matched by sex and age with hearing class peers. A sentence completion task (Loeb and Sarigiani, 1986) is employed to assess such feelings as happiness, sadness, preferences, their desire for change and their personal perception of the consequences of deafness. The results indicate that there are no significant differences between the deaf and hearing adolescents in terms of their feelings of sadness or when expressing what they like most. However, they do differ in what makes them happiest and the things they would like to change. The degree of hearing loss, sex and age of the deaf adolescents led to certain significant differences. The responses obtained suggest the need to implement socio-educational programmes to deaf students that stimulate them to establish friendships and encourage them to have a broader awareness of their social environment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.