Abstract
Acoustic noise is pervasive in human environments. Some individuals are more tolerant to noise than others. We demonstrate the explanatory potential of Big-5 personality traits neuroticism (being emotionally unstable) and extraversion (being enthusiastic, outgoing) on subjective self-report and objective psycho-acoustic metrics of hearing in noise in two samples (total N = 1103). Under statistical control for demographics and in agreement with pre-registered hypotheses, lower neuroticism and higher extraversion independently explained superior self-reported noise resistance, speech-hearing ability and acceptable background noise levels. Surprisingly, objective speech-in-noise recognition instead increased with higher levels of neuroticism. In turn, the bias in subjectively overrating one's own hearing in noise decreases with higher neuroticism but increases with higher extraversion. Of benefit to currently underspecified frameworks of hearing in noise and tailored audiological treatments, these results show that personality explains inter-individual differences in coping with acoustic noise, which is a ubiquitous source of distraction and a health hazard.
Highlights
Exposure to acoustic noise causes damage to the auditory system but is associated with non-auditory health issues, such as cardiovascular disease [2] or sleep disturbance [3]
We conducted an online study to assess the explanatory power of Big-5 personality traits for established, subjective and objective measures of hearing in noise in a sample of N = 1103 participants
To estimate the size of these effects, we report the common language (CL) effect size, which here indicates the following: for a randomly sampled person with above-average self-reported noise resistance (WNSS), the probability for an above-average neuroticism score is about 41%, but about 56% for an above-average extraversion score
Summary
Exposure to acoustic noise causes damage to the auditory system but is associated with non-auditory health issues (for review, see [1]), such as cardiovascular disease [2] or sleep disturbance [3]. People who report higher noise sensitivity are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of noise [4]. 2 It is unclear how public health and audiological rehabilitation should take into account the considerable inter-individual differences in noise sensitivity. As a stable trait and different methods have been developed to assess it, primarily using self-report [5,6]. Most importantly, any such considerations need a solid framework based on the predictors of differences in noise sensitivity [7,8,9]
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