The purpose of this study is to better understand how ear stimulation techniques may impact how people think about themselves in social situations. The goal is to identify how the addition of ear stimulation can impact cognitive processes, including the ways that people think about themselves in social situations and attend to or process social information, that underly an activity known as "self-imagery rescripting." Eligible individuals who are between the ages of 18 and 65 years will complete a variety of activities after providing consent to study participation. These include: (1) completing questionnaires on the computer, (2) completing tasks similar to a video game on the computer, (3) having an electrode attached to their ear that will stimulate nerve activity, (4) completing an interview about how they feel in social situations, and (5) engaging in an activity during which they will be prompted about how they see themselves in social situations. Throughout these activities, participants also will be asked to wear a variety of sensors, bundled together in a cap for their head and individually on other parts of their body, that will collect information about brain activity, heart rate, and eye blinking. Participation in this research study is entirely voluntary and will last approximately 3 hours during a single session at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Participants will be compensated for their time.

There are some risks associated with this study. Some survey questions ask about personal thoughts and feelings. Ear stimulation may cause tingling sensations or irritation around the ear. Thinking and talking about how one sees themselves in social situations may be distressful.

There are no direct benefits to participants. This study will help researchers better understand how ear stimulation can improve the strategies that can help the way that people think about themselves in social situations.

Patients with chronic or episodic recurrent dizziness will track their vestibular symptoms with every episode in the iPhone application, Vertige. They will track their symptoms at the conclusion of every episode for a total of six (6) months. The app has a geolocation software that will pair environmental data (barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, etc.) with symptoms. We will then analyze the data to evaluate for associations.

The study will include 9 key informant interviews discussing how patients developed their impression of the benefit of an implant and how patients prefer expectation data be relayed. No video recordings will be performed during interviews. Interview notes or audio recordings will be taken and uploaded into a password protected network server. The results of interviews will mainly be descriptive. To test the plasticity of preoperative patient expectations and the impact of the CI evaluation the CIQOL expectations form will be administered prior to CI evaluation, directly after the CI evaluation, and prior to surgery for all patients who are undergoing cochlear implantation and meet inclusion/exclusion criteria and agree to participate. The decisional conflict scale will also be administered directly after the CI evaluation and prior to surgery for the above patient group. The 9 patients who undergo key informant interviews will also be part of the larger study group of 200 patients and have the same surveys administered and be subject to the same inclusion/exclusion criteria. The group of patients will also be asked about how they prefer expectation and QOL data to be relayed. All survey data will be collected in a secure RedCap database. Patients expectations at the three preoperative timepoints will be compared using paired T-tests. Data regarding how patients develop expectations and how they prefer expectation data to be presented to them will be mainly qualitative and discussed in terms of the most common themes from patient surveys and interviews. When exploring how patients prefer expectations and QOL data to be relayed we intend to include numbered clinical vignettes relaying differing levels of hearing capability. We will compare relaying information through vignettes to more conventional outcome measures such as speech recognition and QOL scores to determine which is the more effective means of communication.

Older adults typically have trouble identifying the speech they hear, especially in noisy environments. Fortunately, compared to younger adults, older adults are better able to compensate for difficulties identifying the speech they hear by recruiting the visual system. However, the extent to which older adults can benefit from visual input, and how this influence relates to age-related changes in brain structure and function, have not been thoroughly investigated. The general purpose of this study is to determine how age-related changes in brain structure and function affect how well people hear and see. This study seeks participants with normal hearing to mild hearing loss, who also have normal or corrected-to-normal vision.