Does Misophonia Affect Spatial Hearing? A Study Using Closed-Field Assessment Tools

Area of Science:

• Auditory Neuroscience
• Psychoacoustics
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Misophonia is a disorder characterized by strong emotional reactions to specific sounds.
• Spatial hearing, the ability to perceive the location of sounds, relies on binaural cues like interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD).
• The relationship between misophonia and objective measures of spatial hearing remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate spatial hearing abilities in individuals with misophonia.
• To compare interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) thresholds, and Virtual Acoustic Spatial Identification (VASI) scores between individuals with and without misophonia.
• To explore correlations between spatial hearing performance and misophonia severity.

Main Methods:

• A group comparison study involving 40 participants with normal hearing, divided into 20 with misophonia and 20 controls.
• Misophonia diagnosis based on the Amsterdam Misophonia Questionnaire (A-MISO-S).
• Behavioral assessments included ITD, ILD, and VASI tests in a closed-field environment.

Main Results:

• The misophonic group showed significantly higher ITD thresholds and lower VASI accuracy compared to controls.
• Poorer performance in the misophonic group was noted at specific spatial locations (R45, L45) in the VASI test.
• A negative correlation was found between A-MISO-S scores and VASI accuracy in the misophonic group.
• Fisher discriminant analysis indicated ITD and VASI effectively predict group segregation with 95% accuracy.

Conclusions:

• Misophonia is associated with deficits in binaural hearing tasks, particularly those relying on temporal ITD cues and spatial identification.
• These auditory processing differences may stem from limited cognitive resources or altered binaural temporal processing in individuals with misophonia.