Scientists think they’ve found the cure for misophonia. Do you have the brain disorder?
The condition that causes extreme discomfort in response to certain sounds may be more than just a sensory issue, but rather a result of emotional and attention regulation problems that can be treated.
A visceral feeling of disgust upon hearing someone chew a crunchy snack or clear their throat is a sign of misophonia, which affects approximately five percent of the US population, equating to roughly 13 million people.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and the Hashir International Specialist Clinics & Research Institute for Misophonia, Tinnitus and Hyperacusis in London believe the condition goes beyond the lens of auditory processing or sensory hypersensitivity.
New research suggests that at its core, misophonia is linked to a few key mental patterns. People with the condition often have more trouble shifting their focus away from negative emotions and tend to get stuck in cycles of repetitive, negative thoughts, a process known as rumination.
They also frequently report feeling mentally rigid. Instead of the emotional state passing, the mind gets locked onto it, which fuels the intense reaction and the cycle of rumination that often follows. Importantly, these traits are specific to misophonia itself and aren’t just side effects of common issues like anxiety or depression.
In discovering that the condition may be hardwired into someone’s brain, it could open a door for potential treatments, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness-based treatments, and metacognitive training, which focuses on changing someone’s thoughts rather than their thinking habits.
The researchers argued in their latest study that these methods could help people shift away from rigid thought patterns and develop greater emotional adaptability in response to sensory triggers.
Hearing someone chew a crunchy snack can be highly distressing for people with misophonia. The disorder can lead to feelings of visceral disgust or anger (stock)
Misophonia often causes feelings of disgust, but the response can also be anger or anxiety, and research shows that people with the condition often struggle with key mental management skills, known as executive functions.
A core issue among sufferers is cognitive inflexibility, meaning they find it extremely difficult to stop focusing on a trigger sound and shift their attention away.
This leads to a cycle of hyper-focusing on the sound, anxious anticipation of it, and trouble engaging with anything else. In short, their brain gets ‘stuck’ on the trigger, which aligns with their own reports of being mentally inflexible.
Researchers found that people with misophonia have a consistent kind of mental rigidity, which showed up in two ways: they struggled with quick emotional shifts during a test, and they described themselves as generally inflexible in their daily lives.
This pattern of thinking is also a common feature in conditions often linked to misophonia, like OCD, autism and PTSD, which can be helped with CBT.
Study author Dr Mercede Erfanian said: ‘For a long time, I’ve thought that misophonia might be more than just a sound-sensitivity condition. Instead of sound sensitivity being the root cause, it might actually be just one symptom of a broader, more complex disorder.’
The study involved 140 adults, with an average age of 30, and 128 were recruited via an online platform. A smaller group of 12 was recruited from misophonia support communities to ensure a strong representation of those with the condition.
The researchers used a recognized benchmark to identify participants with significant misophonia, specifically a score of 87 or higher out of 250 on the 25-item S-Five questionnaire, which measures the severity of misophonia.
This violin graph shows that people (represented by dots) with significant misophonia (group b) are worse at the emotional switching task than people without it (group a). A wider section means more people had that score. The group A shape is wider higher up, meaning more people in this group had high accuracy scores. Group B’s shape is more narrow at the top and wider lower down, meaning more people in this group had lower accuracy scores
According to this measure, 35 individuals in the study, 25 percent of the total, fell into this category.
To investigate the core research questions, participants first completed a specialized computer task known as the Memory and Affective Flexibility Task (MAFT) designed to measure a specific skill called affective flexibility, or the ability to rapidly shift one’s thinking and attention in response to emotionally charged pictures.
First, to establish a baseline, people were shown a series of images and simply had to decide if the picture they were seeing now was the same as one they saw a few pictures back.
Then, without warning, a new picture would appear, and instead of asking about memory, the task would ask if the image was positive, such as a happy baby, or negative, like a mutilated body.
If the picture was from the ‘positive’ category and the participant pressed the corresponding ‘positive’ key, that was accurate. If the picture was from the ‘negative’ category and the participant pressed the ‘negative’ key, that was accurate.
High accuracy on the switch trials shows a flexible brain that could cleanly shift gears under emotional pressure. Low accuracy indicates a ‘stuck’ brain, meaning it was overwhelmed by the picture’s content or unable to disengage from the previous task.
This directly parallels misophonia. Poor performance suggests the struggle is not just with trigger sounds, but with a broader inability to disengage from any harmful emotional distraction, like crunching food. The brain gets stuck on a trigger sound in life just as it got stuck on a disturbing picture in the lab.
The average person in the misophonia group performed worse than about 75 percent of the people in the non-misophonia group on the MAFT.
The study found people with misophonia share a core trait of mental rigidity. This was evident both in their difficulty with emotional shifts during a lab test and in their self-reported inflexibility in daily life, a cognitive style also common in conditions like OCD and autism (stock)
As scores for mental rigidity went up, misophonia severity also went up, even after accounting for other factors like anxiety, and still explained a significant and unique portion of a person’s misophonia symptoms.
Following the computer task, all of the study participants completed a comprehensive array of established psychological questionnaires used to quantitatively measure several key traits, including the severity of their misophonia symptoms, their self-reported level of cognitive inflexibility in daily life and their tendency to engage in different forms of rumination, including brooding and anger-related repetitive thoughts.
A person’s mental rigidity led to misophonia distress largely because it made them prone to getting stuck in cycles of negative thinking.
The researchers discovered that repetitive negative thoughts were a major reason why mental rigidity leads to misophonia. This thinking style was responsible for about 40 percent of the link between the two.
Their findings were published in the British Journal of Psychology.
Dr Erfanian said: ‘Misophonia is a real, disabling disorder, not simply an overreaction to annoying sounds. It is not caused by a problem with the ears or hearing.
‘Proper diagnosis requires expertise, since it is complex and multifaceted. Importantly, sound sensitivity may be just one outward symptom, pointing to a broader set of psychological differences, similar to autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder OCD.’
