Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 5-1-2024
Journal
Undergraduate Honours Theses
Abstract
Misophonia is a disorder characterized by strong, negative emotional responses to specific auditory stimuli, such as chewing or tapping. This thesis investigates the relationship between misophonia and music, two seemingly unrelated topics in human auditory processing. Despite their apparent dissimilarity, they share a common thread: music often elicits strong emotional responses, even in individuals with misophonia. Building upon the hypothesis that heightened emotion enhances memory, this study explores how misophonia relates to musical memory and emotion categorization. A total of 72 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (Low Misophonia: n = 42, High Misophonia: n = 30) completed a series of tasks including a memory encoding task, beat alignment filler task, and melody recognition task. Contrary to expectations, participants in the high misophonia group did not demonstrate significantly different performance compared to those in the low misophonia group across the tasks. However, analyses revealed significant findings among participants as a whole, irrespective of misophonia severity, particularly in relation to musical memory and emotion categorization. These findings contribute to our understanding of music's interaction with misophonia and shed light on broader aspects of music processing. While the results did not support the initial hypothesis, they provide valuable insights into the complex interplay between auditory stimuli, emotion, and memory. Further research in this area may uncover additional nuances in individuals affected by misophonia. Overall, this study advances our knowledge of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms underlying misophonia and music processing, offering implications for theoretical frameworks within the fields of psychology and neuroscience.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Notes
Thesis Advisor(s): Dr. Stephen Van Hedger