Abstract
Misophonia is a condition where a strong arousal response is triggered when hearing specific human generated sounds, like chewing, and/or repetitive tapping noises, like pen clicking. It is diagnosed with clinical interviews and questionnaires since no psychoacoustic tools exist to assess its presence. The present study was aimed at developing and testing a new assessment tool for misophonia. The method was inspired by an approach we have recently developed for hyperacusis. It consisted of presenting subjects (n = 253) with misophonic, pleasant, and unpleasant sounds in an online experiment. The task was to rate them on a pleasant to unpleasant visual analog scale. Subjects were labeled as misophonics (n = 78) or controls (n = 55) by using self-report questions and a misophonia questionnaire, the MisoQuest. There was a significant difference between controls and misophonics in the median global rating of misophonic sounds. On the other hand, median global rating of unpleasant, and pleasant sounds did not differ significantly. We selected a subset of the misophonic sounds to form the core discriminant sounds of misophonia (CDSMiso). A metric: the CDS score, was used to quantitatively measure misophonia, both with a global score and with subscores. The latter could specifically quantify aversion towards different sound sources/events, i.e., mouth, breathing/nose, throat, and repetitive sounds. A receiver operating characteristic analysis showed that the method accurately classified subjects with and without misophonia (accuracy = 91%). The present study suggests that the psychoacoustic test we have developed can be used to assess misophonia reliably and quickly.
Highlights
Misophonia is a condition where a strong arousal response is triggered when hearing specific human generated sounds, like chewing, and/or repetitive tapping noises, like pen clicking
Misophonia, literally hatred of sound1, is a condition where subjects experience negative emotional reactions2,3 and a strong autonomic arousal response when hearing specific “trigger” sounds4,5. These triggers most often contain human generated mouth sounds, breathing and nose sounds, throat sounds, and repetitive sounds of objects operated by humans2–4
The MisoQuest cut-off value was highly specific to the self-report of misophonia: 99% of subjects not self-reporting misophonia had a MisoQuest score below 61
Summary
Misophonia is a condition where a strong arousal response is triggered when hearing specific human generated sounds, like chewing, and/or repetitive tapping noises, like pen clicking. It is diagnosed with clinical interviews and questionnaires since no psychoacoustic tools exist to assess its presence. Misophonia, literally hatred of sound, is a condition where subjects experience negative emotional reactions (e.g., irritation, anger and/or disgust) and a strong autonomic arousal response when hearing specific “trigger” sounds4,5 These triggers most often contain human generated mouth sounds (e.g., chewing and slurping), breathing and nose sounds (e.g., heavy breathing and sniffing), throat sounds (e.g., swallowing and throat clearing), and repetitive sounds of objects operated by humans (e.g., pen clicking and keyboard typing). No audiological problems are detected (e.g., audiogram, loudness discomfort levels, and speech audiometry), and cases of tinnitus and hyperacusis are scarce (2% and Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:11044
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