Abstract
Objectives. This study examined the relationship between acceptable noise level (ANL) and personality. ANL is the difference between a person's most comfortable level for speech and the loudest level of background noise they are willing to accept while listening to speech. Design. Forty young adults with normal hearing participated. ANLs were measured and two personality tests (Big Five Inventory, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) were administered. Results. The analysis revealed a correlation between ANL and the openness and conscientious personality dimensions from the Big Five Inventory; no correlation emerged between ANL and the Myers-Briggs personality types. Conclusions. Lower ANLs are correlated with full-time hearing aid use and the openness personality dimension; higher ANLs are correlated with part-time or hearing aid nonuse and the conscientious personality dimension. Current data suggest that those more open to new experiences may accept more noise and possibly be good hearing aid candidates, while those more conscientious may accept less noise and reject hearing aids, based on their unwillingness to accept background noise. Knowing something about a person's personality type may help audiologists determine if their patients will likely be good candidates for hearing aids.
Department(s)
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Document Type
Article
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/902532
Rights Information
Copyright © 2013 the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publication Date
2013
Recommended Citation
Franklin, Cliff, Laura V. Johnson, Letitia White, Clay Franklin, and Laura Smith-Olinde. "The relationship between personality type and acceptable noise levels: a pilot study." ISRN otolaryngology 2013 (2013).
Journal Title
ISRN Otolaryngology
