Psychoacoustic correlates of individual noise sensitivity

In environmental noise surveys, self-reported noise sensitivity, a stable personality trait covering attitudes toward a wide range of environmental sounds, is a major predictor of individual noise-annoyance reactions. Its relationship to basic measures of auditory functioning, however, has not been systematically explored. Therefore, in the present investigation, a sample of 61 unselected listeners was subjected to a battery of psychoacoustic procedures ranging from threshold determinations to loudness scaling tasks. No significant differences in absolute thresholds, intensity discrimination, simple auditory reaction time, or power-function exponents for loudness emerged, when the sample was split along the median into two groups of "low" vs "high" noise sensitivity on the basis of scores obtained from a psychometrically evaluated questionnaire [Zimmer and Ellermeier, Diagnostica 44, 11-20 (1998)]. Small, but systematic differences were found in verbal loudness estimates, and in ratings of the unpleasantness of natural sounds, thus suggesting that self-reported noise sensitivity captures evaluative rather than sensory aspects of auditory processing.