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The impact of disgusting sounds on pupil diameter of misophonic and non-misophonic listeners
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  • Urszula Oszczapinska,
  • Sungjoon Park,
  • Yuqi Qiu,
  • Bridget Nance,
  • Megan Julien,
  • Laurie Heller
Urszula Oszczapinska
Carnegie Mellon University
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Sungjoon Park
Carnegie Mellon University
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Yuqi Qiu
Carnegie Mellon University
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Bridget Nance
Carnegie Mellon University
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Megan Julien
Carnegie Mellon University
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Laurie Heller
Carnegie Mellon University

Corresponding Author:hellerl@andrew.cmu.edu

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Abstract

jabbrv-ltwa-all.ldf jabbrv-ltwa-en.ldf 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).
18 Oct 2024Submitted to Psychophysiology
19 Oct 2024Submission Checks Completed
19 Oct 2024Assigned to Editor
19 Oct 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
28 Oct 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
01 Dec 2024Editorial Decision: Revise Minor
21 Dec 20241st Revision Received