Resolving competition in auditory cortex: effects of emotional content and misophonia sensitivity

How the human auditory cortex prioritizes relevant information amid concurrent sounds has been a long-standing question in auditory cognitive neuroscience. The present study used auditory steady-state responses to tag the electrocortical response to a tone embedded in concurrent naturalistic sounds, addressing methodological challenges with overlapping auditory streams. Participants endorsing low (high misophonia symptoms) or high misophonia symptoms-a condition with decreased tolerance to specific, typically orofacial, sounds-were recruited. Sounds varied in emotional valence (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) to investigate how emotional content modulates attentional competition. Orofacial sounds were also included to evaluate how attentional biases are affected by inter-individual sensitivity toward a specific sound category. Affective ratings, alpha-band changes, and pupil dilation were also assessed. Hypothetical models of competition were tested, revealing a facilitation trend in the auditory steady-state responses amplitude when accompanied by pleasant and unpleasant, compared to neutral sounds, regardless of misophonia symptoms. However, auditory steady-state responses was selectively reduced in the high misophonia symptoms but not the high misophonia symptoms group when accompanied by orofacial sounds. Analyses of alpha-band, pupil, and rating data showed that the groups differed primarily in their response to pleasant sounds and orofacial sounds, with the high misophonia symptoms group exhibiting a stronger response to orofacial sounds than the high misophonia symptoms group.