Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Integrated Article

Degree

Master of Science

Program

Neuroscience

Supervisor

Butler, Blake E.

Abstract

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.

Summary for Lay Audience

The role inhibition can often go unnoticed when doing simple tasks, such as conversing with a friend while at work. In this example, your brain is suppressing irrelevant information, such as other conversations, in order to focus on your friend. While at least part of the mechanism responsible for the suppression is efficient in typical populations, some individuals struggle to successfully filter out irrelevant information, and are described as having poor sensory gating capacity. In the laboratory setting, sensory gating can be assessed by using a dual-click paradigm - a task that can probe an individual’s ability to suppress repeated stimuli by presenting repeated identical tones and determining if a participant’s brain responds less to the second tone, reflecting effective sensory gating. While this assessment has been used to examine gating capacity in neurotypical individuals and those with disorders like ADHD, it has yet to be used to explore sound processing in people with misophonia. Misophonia is a psychological condition where individuals cannot tolerate certain sounds to the point where they exhibit intense negative emotional reactions coupled with a salient fight or flight response. Misophonic ‘triggers’, or sounds that elicit the misophonic experience, tend to be repetitive in nature, suggesting that those with misophonia may have difficulty suppressing repetitive sensory information. Accordingly, thte current study seeks to bridge the gap in the literature by administering the dual-click paradigm to determine whether those who exhibit more severe misophonic symptoms exhibit sensory gating deficits in comparison to those who do not. Because it is understudied and poorly understood, an individual cannot be formally diagnosed with misophonia, meaning that those suffering cannot follow an empirically supported treatment option. Better understanding the deficits that underlie the experience of misophonia will help establish diagnostic tools and inform therapeutic interventions.

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