The impact of disgusting sounds on pupil diameter of misophonic and
non-misophonic listeners
Abstract
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Everyday sounds can elicit a range of emotional and physiological
responses. For individuals with misophonia, some sounds can produce
strong feelings of disgust, annoyance, and anger, often accompanied by
increased perspiration and heart rate. Presently, methods of diagnosing
misophonia rely on clinical interviews and self-assessment scales. Our
study asks whether pupillometry can be an objective measure that
correlates with self-reported misophonia severity. Previous studies show
that both unpleasant and pleasant sounds increase pupil diameter
(Partala and Surakka, 2003; Nakakoga et al., 2020); however, these have
not compared pupil responses to disgust versus other emotions. Given
prior indications that the response to visually disgusting stimuli is
pupil constriction (Ayzenberg et al., 2018), we asked whether the pupil
dilation to auditorily disgusting stimuli would be smaller than for
other emotional sounds. In our listening task, we monitored pupil size
changes while participants listened to positive and negative emotional
sounds from the IADS database (Bradley and Lang, 2007) along with
“triggers” known to be especially aversive to misophonics.
Participants reported the intensity of their emotional reactions
(disgust, anger, annoyance, happiness, sadness, fear) as well as valence
and arousal. Misophonic listeners reported greater emotion intensity for
emotions associated with triggers (disgust, anger, annoyance) as well as
for fear. For all listeners, there was a positive association between
changes in pupil diameter and emotion intensity. Overall, misophonics
had greater pupil dilation than non-misophonics, but after equating for
emotion category of the sounds, misophonic pupil dilation was only
larger for trigger sounds (and marginally, disgusting sounds).