Written by Ghazaleh Mazouni.
Imagine you are sitting in a classroom. Suddenly, someone approaches the blackboard and drags their fingernails across it. Feel a surge of irritation in your body? Perhaps your face is distorted into a grimace and your muscles are tense, because the unbearable sounds press on your nerves?
Now imagine experiencing the same intense reactions every day to the most common sounds: your partner’s breathing, your dog barking outside, your refrigerator humming.
This is the reality for people living with misophonia. Misophonia is a recently recognized clinical condition in which certain sounds, known as trigger sounds, cause intense psychological and physical reactions. Trigger sounds are typically mouth sounds produced by humans, such as chewing, slurping, or sniffing, but may include other sounds such as banging a fork, creaking a window, or tapping a drum with a finger. There is also. Although the prevalence of misophonia has long been underestimated, a recent large-scale study by Laura J. Dixon et al. It is estimated that he experiences levels of misophonia.
The role of beliefs and context
It’s easy to think that misophonia is just about sound, but as it turns out, the name itself literally means “aversion to sound.” But as misophonia’s popularity grows among researchers, more studies are finding that beliefs and expectations about the source of the sound also play an important role in misophonic responses. For example, the study by Marie-Anick Savard et al. (2022). We found that embedding different levels of white noise into the trigger sound to make it harder to identify significantly reduced its impact. In other words, the more difficult the trigger sound is to identify, the less likely it is to be triggered. Negative emotional responses in participants with misophonia.
In a recent study published in last month’s issue of Multisensory Research, my colleagues and I found that changing the visual source of a trigger sound can affect how people with misophonia experience that sound. I investigated whether it is possible. In other words, can changing the visual context of a trigger sound lead misophonic participants to believe that the sound they are hearing is not a trigger but a positive or neutral non-trigger sound? I wanted to know. If so, does this change in belief affect how comfortable or unpleasant they find the sound?
To this end, we recruited 31 participants with misophonia. All had relatively high scores on the symptom severity scale of the Duke Misophonia Questionnaire (DMQ; Rosenthal et al., 2021 ). We also recruited 26 control participants with low scores on the DMQ.
We presented all participants with a series of videos with swapped sounds from a recent paper (Samermit et al., 2022). There, 13 common trigger sounds (e.g., squeals) were paired with Positive Attributable Visual Sources (PAVS; e.g., puppies). (e.g. barking) or original video source (OVS; e.g. window cleaning). After watching each video, participants rated its comfort, discomfort, and intensity of the physical sensations they felt. Participants also had the opportunity to write a short description of how their body felt. Click below to see examples of PAVS and OVS using the exact same sounds.
Visual sources are important
Our results showed that when the trigger sound was heard under a positive visual context, negative responses were significantly reduced compared to the original visual context. Both misophonia and control participants rated the trigger sound as more pleasant when they heard it in the context of PAVS. Interestingly, compared to the control group, misophonia participants reported significantly reduced negative body sensations when the trigger sound was presented in the context of PAVS. The results can be seen in the figure below.
Experimental results
Source: Mahzouni et al. (2024)
Even more convincing were misophonia participants’ subjective descriptions of bodily sensations in response to PAVS and OVS stimuli. For example, one misophonia participant described a response to a gulp sound in the original visual context (OVS) as “I felt my nose crinkle and my body tense up,” but in the PAVS context, the response to the same sound was He explained his reaction as follows: “I felt a sense of relief in my chest.” When we analyzed the valence of these subjective descriptions, we found that, overall, participants felt more at ease with the OVS clip compared to the PAVS clip, even though the sounds were the same. found that they used more negative words to describe their bodily sensations in response to.
Explanation example
Source: Mahzouni et al. (2024)
The idea that vision can alter the experience of sound is nothing new. Indeed, a classic example of this type of visual dominance is demonstrated in the McGuirk illusion (McGurk and MacDonald, 1978), where the auditory utterance /ba ba/ and the visual mouth movement /ga ga/ Combined, they cause a fused perception. “Dada”. Because vision is our primary sense, we tend to trust it more when faced with contradictory information from other sensory sources.
Our experimental results support this notion and suggest that positive visual sources can override the negative responses normally associated with trigger sounds. Additionally, these benefits are more pronounced for those experiencing high levels of misophonia. This suggests that misophonia should be considered more holistically, taking into account the visual context in which the trigger sound occurs. This study may also open new avenues for creating interventions that incorporate sound-swapped stimuli.