We examined the influence of background noise on levels of problem behavior and pain behavior under functional analysis conditions for a child with a diagnosis of Williams syndrome and hyperacusis. Background noise was associated with increases in escape-maintained problem behavior and increases in pain behavior such as clasping ears and crying. When the child was fitted with earplugs, there we...

The perceived negative influence of standard hearing protectors on communication is a common argument for not wearing them. Thus, "augmented" protectors have been developed to improve speech intelligibility. Nevertheless, their actual benefit remains a point of concern. In this paper, speech perception with active earplugs is compared to standard passive custom-made earplugs. The two types of a...

We measured the sound level and frequencies of the acoustic noise generated by a 3 Tesla (T) MR scanner, and investigated the subjective sound level for 30 healthy volunteers with either earplugs, headphones or both. The sound level of 3T was found to be higher than that of 1.5T in all sequences. The peak sound pressure level of 3T ranged from 125.7 dB for MR angiography to 130.7 dB for single ...

Recent results have shown that auditory localization in the horizontal plane is dramatically worse for listeners wearing double hearing protection ~earplugs and earmuffs! than it is for listeners wearing single hearing protection ~earplugs or earmuffs alone!. This suggests that double hearing protection might also impair the spatial unmasking that normally occurs when two simultaneous talkers a...

Quality sleep is a problem for the critically ill who are cared for in an environment where interventions night and day are common, staff members are constantly present in relatively high numbers, and treatment is accompanied by a range of changing warning tones and alarms and lights. These critical care units are generally designed without a focus on patient comfort, sleep, and rest and often ...

OBJECTIVES The study was done to determine whether the noise attenuation attained with the use of earplugs can be improved by teaching the proper insertion of earplugs to users. METHODS Fifty-four randomly selected male subjects were divided into an untrained group (25 persons) and a trained group (29 persons). The trained group was given a lecture on earplug insertion and allowed to practise...

Response times (RT) in an audio-visual target acquisition task were collected from 3 participants while wearing either circumaural earmuffs, foam earplugs, or no hearing protection. Analyses revealed that participants took significantly longer to locate and identify an audio-visual target in both hearing protector conditions than they did in the unoccluded condition, suggesting a disturbance of...