Analyzing Sensory Gating Capacity in Misophonia

Misophonia is a pattern of aberrant sound perception that is defined by atypical emotional, neurophysiological, and behavioral reactivity to specific pattern-based trigger sounds (Brout et al., 2018). Those with misophonia exhibit increased arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, coupled with emotional distress, when in the presence of trigger sounds (Edelstein et al. 2013). We propose that individuals who experience this phenomenon may have difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli, such that repetitive and otherwise banal sounds cannot be ignored. Thus, the current study recorded responses to pairs of repeated stimuli from participants across the misophonic severity spectrum in order to gain a measure of the degree to which misophonic experiences are associated with the ability to suppress the representation of repeated sounds. We found that misophonic symptom severity was associated with self-reports of early phase inhibition, but evidence of a relationship to objective measures of gating was less clear. These findings lay key groundwork on the relationship between aberrant early phase processing and misophonia from which future studies can expand on.