New research has linked misophonia, which is the extreme aversion to certain sounds, to less affective flexibility and a greater tendency to ruminate.
Hearing involves more than just the ears – it is closely linked to how we think and feel. A recent shed light on the possible links between hearing, emotion and cognition at investigate misophoniaa condition in which someone has an extreme emotional response to specific sounds.
If you have ever felt inexplicably furious when sound of someone chewing or clicking a pen, perhaps you have some idea of what people with misophonia experience. Triggers can be sounds made by the human body – someone eating chips, cracking their fingers or breathing heavily. But these are not just bodily sounds; a ticking clock or a barking dog can provoke the same intense reaction.
Emotional responses range from irritation to extreme anger and disgust. And it’s not just feelings. Physically, people with misophonia experience fight or flight responses when they hear uncomfortable sounds. For some, the condition becomes so debilitating that they avoid situations where they might encounter these sounds, which can seriously affect their daily lives and relationships.
But why do certain sounds cause such extreme reactions? The new study suggests that people with misophonia may have more difficulty switching focus between emotional and non-emotional information – a skill known as “affective flexibility“.
The researchers tested 140 adults with a median age of 30 years, including those with clinically significant misophonia symptoms and those whose symptoms did not meet clinical thresholds. Participants completed a memory and affective flexibility task, which involved memory and emotional tasks using images rather than sounds.
Participants were asked to alternate between recalling details and judging the emotional content of the images. Researchers found that the severity of a person’s misophonia was associated with your ability to respond accurately to emotional tasks. More severe misophonia was associated with worse accuracy on these tasks, suggesting reduced mental flexibility when dealing with emotional stimuli.
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Based on questionnaire responses, people with more severe misophonia also had a stronger tendency to ruminate. Rumination refers to getting stuck in negative thoughts about the past, present, or future, which can cause distress.
It should be noted that the questionnaires did not specifically address rumination on misophonia experiences – it was a general tendency to getting stuck in negative thought patterns.
Rumination is a symptom of several mental health problems, including anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This link between misophonia and rumination suggests that the condition may be related to how people process emotions in general, rather than just how they react to certain sounds.
These findings highlight just how complex our experiences with sound can be. Hearing is, in fact, much more than just the ear doing its job. More severe misophonia may be linked to less mental flexibility in relation to emotional situations and a stronger habit of negative thinking.
It is crucial to understand that these findings reflect correlation, not causation. We cannot say that reduced mental flexibility causes misophonia, or that misophonia causes reduced flexibility. The relationship can work either way, or both can be influenced by some other factor. Still, the researchers suggest that these findings could help inform how misophonia is diagnosed in the future.
There are some limitations to consider. The memory and affective flexibility task is new until this year, so there is limited data on how it works. It would also be useful for future research use sounds instead of images to better understand how visual versus auditory emotional stimuli relate to misophonia. The study also did not use a control task to compare switching between emotional and non-emotional tasks, which would have strengthened the findings.
Misophonia continues to be an underexplored area of research. We don’t really know how common it is around the world, and research into treatment is still at an early stage. There is even debate about what classification of disorder misophonia should be grouped under, if any.
For people with misophonia, the condition can seriously disrupt everyday life. Further exploration of the diversity of auditory experiences will be fundamental to understanding how people process sound and how best to alleviate the discomfort it brings.
