Stress is a common psychological and physiological response, and its impact may vary depending on how individuals perceive and cope with everyday demands. Perceived stress may be associated with physiological regulation, attention, and sensory informa...
Stress is a common psychological and physiological response, and its impact may vary depending on how individuals perceive and cope with everyday demands. Perceived stress may be associated with physiological regulation, attention, and sensory information processing. University students are an appropriate group for examining perceived stress because they are in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. They are also frequently exposed to stress from academic demands, career preparation, and interpersonal relationships. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the characteristics of auditory function according to sex and perceived stress level in young adults with normal hearing.
A total of 66 university students aged 20-29 years (33 males, 33 females; mean age 24.21 ± 2.30) participated in this study. Participants were classified into low, medium, and high stress groups based on the Korean Perceived Stress Scale-10 (K-PSS-10), with 22 participants in each group. Auditory function was evaluated using extended high-frequency audiometry (9–20 kHz), the binaural speech reception threshold (SRT) of the Korean Digits-in-Noise (K-DIN) test, and the latency and amplitude measures of auditory brainstem response (ABR) at 90 and 80 dB nHL. Data were analyzed using two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the significance level set at .05.
The results showed limited differences in extended high-frequency hearing thresholds according to perceived stress level. A significant stress-group effect was found only at 10 kHz in the right ear, where the medium stress group showed higher thresholds than the low and high stress groups. However, no consistent differences were observed at the other individual frequencies or in the band-averaged extended high-frequency thresholds. The binaural K-DIN SRT showed no significant effects of sex, stress group, or their interaction.
For the ABR results, significant findings were observed primarily in latency measures. Significant sex effects were observed in several ABR latency measures, with males generally showing longer latencies than females. Stress-group effects were found in several ABR latency measures, including Wave III absolute latency at 90 dB nHL in the right ear, Wave V absolute latency at both 90 and 80 dB nHL, and the right III–V and I–V interpeak latencies. Significant sex-by-stress group interactions were also observed for Wave III absolute latency in the left ear and Wave V amplitude in the left ear, although the follow-up analyses for Wave V amplitude were not significant.
These findings suggest that auditory function characteristics may vary according to sex and perceived stress level, even in young adults with normal hearing. However, the pattern of findings varied depending on the auditory measures used in this study. Extended high-frequency hearing thresholds and K-DIN performance showed limited or non-significant findings, whereas ABR latency measures showed relatively more noticeable differences. Therefore, perceived stress level may be associated with certain auditory neural timing-related measures, but the findings should be interpreted as associations rather than direct effects of stress.