Assessing Misophonia: Cross-Cultural Validation of the MisoQuest and its Relation with Cognitive Functioning
Abstract
Misophonia is a disorder involving an aversion to specific ordinary sounds, such as chewing and breathing. These “trigger” sounds can be easily ignored by typically-developed listeners, but elicit negative emotional reactions, physiological stress, and cognitive impairment in people with misophonia. The severity of the misophonic reaction differs between individuals but is often accompanied by psychological distress. However, misophonia is not yet classified as a psychological disorder in diagnostic manuals, largely because it is unclear how it should be defined and assessed. The current study aims to provide evidence of reliability and validity for the MisoQuest–a measure recently developed by Siepsiak and colleagues (2020a) to capture misophonia symptom severity. The MisoQuest was originally developed in Polish, and this study is the first to investigate the psychometric properties of the English-translated MisoQuest in an English-speaking sample. We demonstrate that the English-translated MisoQuest has excellent internal consistency, strong test re-test reliability over five-weeks, and that scores on the measure specifically tap misophonia symptom severity rather than generalized anxiety or broader sensory sensitivities. We also provide evidence of criterion validity by demonstrating that higher MisoQuest scores predict poorer performance on cognitive tasks in the presence of trigger sounds relative to silence. Overall, the results of this study indicate that the MisoQuest is a reliable and useful measure for identifying misophonia in English-speaking individuals and that scores on this measure are related to clinically relevant outcomes.