Elsevier

Behavior Therapy

Volume 49, Issue 2, March 2018, Pages 286-294
Behavior Therapy

Profile Analysis of Psychological Symptoms Associated With Misophonia: A Community Sample

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2017.07.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Misophonia is a condition characterized by extreme negative emotional reactions to specific sounds.

  • A large community sample (N = 628) were assessed for misophonia severity and other psychopathology variables.

  • A profile extracted differentiated misophonia individuals from those without, with need for ordering especially distinct.

Abstract

Misophonia is characterized by extreme aversive reactions to certain classes of sounds. It has recently been recognized as a condition associated with significant disability. Research has begun to evaluate psychopathological correlates of misophonia. This study sought to identify profiles of psychopathology that characterize misophonia in a large community sample. A total of N = 628 adult participants completed a battery of measures assessing anxiety and anxiety sensitivity, depression, stress responses, anger, dissociative experiences, obsessive-compulsive symptoms and beliefs, distress tolerance, bodily perceptions, as well as misophonia severity. Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS) was employed to evaluate profiles associated with elevated misophonia and those without symptoms. Three profiles were extracted. The first two accounted for 70% total variance and did not show distinctions between groups. The third profile accounted for 11% total variance, and showed that misophonia is associated with lower obsessive-compulsive symptoms for neutralizing, obsessions generally, and washing compared to those not endorsing misophonia, and higher levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms associated with ordering and harm avoidance. This third profile extracted also showed significant differences between those with and without misophonia on the scale assessing physical concerns (that is, sensitivity to interoceptive sensations) as assessed with the ASI-3. Further research is called for involving diagnostic interviewing and experimental methods to clarify these putative mechanisms associated with misophonia.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk is an online labor market in which workers can browse Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) by keyword, compensation, availability, and qualifications. Workers are paid in exchange for their task completion (Shapiro, Chandler, & Mueller, 2013). In the current study, participants were eligible to participate if they were English speaking and between the ages of 18 and 75. Participants received $2.50 in exchange for their

Results

Table 1 displays the descriptive data for the sample, including means and standard deviations for the scales used in the study. Analysis of the measures included in the profile analysis (subscales of the OCI-R, Harm Avoidance [HA], Incompleteness [INC], and the physical subscale of the ASI-R) suggest a single profile best describes the data, and accounts for 58% of the pattern variance. There were two additional resultant profiles that accounted for 12% and 11% of the variance, respectively. In

Discussion

There has been growing recognition that misophonia represents a potentially severe clinical problem. To date there has been limited research into the basic pathology and clinical correlates of the condition. Given that sufferers report severe aversive emotional reactions to specific sounds or classes of sounds, the limited research has focused on psychopathological indicators of the condition.

This study identified a putative profile that distinguishes those with and without self-reported

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

References (41)

  • S. Taylor et al.

    Sensory intolerance: Latent structure of psychopathological correlates

    Comprehensive Psychiatry

    (2014)
  • S. Taylor et al.

    The sense of incompleteness as a motivator of obsessive-compulsive symptoms: An empirical analysis of concepts and correlates

    Behavior Therapy

    (2014)
  • M.G. Wheaton et al.

    Dimensions of anxiety sensitivity in the anxiety disorders: Evaluation of the ASI-3

    Journal of Anxiety Disorders

    (2012)
  • M.M. Antony et al.

    Psychometric properties of the 42-item and 21-item versions of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales in clinical groups and a community sample

    Psychological Assessment

    (1998)
  • E. Bernstein et al.

    Development, reliability and validity of a dissociation scale

    The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

    (1986)
  • G. Bruxner

    “Mastication rage”: A review of misophonia – an underrecognized symptom of psychiatric relevance?

    Australasian Psychiatry

    (2016)
  • C.S. Carver et al.

    Behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: The BIS/BAS scales

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1994)
  • M. Edelstein et al.

    Misophonia: Physiological investigations and case descriptions

    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

    (2013)
  • G.M. Ferreira et al.

    Hatred of sounds: Misophonic disorder or just an underreported psychiatric symptom?

    Annals of Clinical Psychiatry

    (2013)
  • E. Foa et al.

    The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory: Development and validation of a short version

    Psychological Assessment

    (2002)
  • Cited by (49)

    • A neuropsychological study of misophonia

      2024, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
    • Mindfulness and cognitive emotion regulation in pediatric misophonia

      2023, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science
    • Misophonia: A psychological model and proposed treatment

      2022, Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders
      Citation Excerpt :

      Findings suggesting a relationship between misophonia and rigidity are consistent with research related to the cognitions and emotions of misophonia patients. For example, McKay et al. (2018) found that the cognitions associated with misophonia are an inflated sense of responsibility, perfectionism, and intolerance for uncertainty. Individuals with rigidity often engage in perfectionistic behaviors and hold exceedingly high standards for themselves (Pinto, 2016), which can generate an inflated sense of personal responsibility.

    • Correlates of obsessive-compulsive and related disorders symptom severity during the COVID-19 pandemic

      2021, Journal of Psychiatric Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      After agreeing to participate, interested voluunteers were directed to a Qualtrics-based series of questionnaires (see below), where informed consent was given. The AMT is an American online crowdsourcing platform in which workers can browse Human Intelligence Tasks by keyword, compensation, availability, and qualifications (McKay et al., 2018). Shapiro et al. (2013) demonstrated that the prevalence of mental health problems identified in AMT studies were similar or higher than in the general population.

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    This research was supported by a grant from the Sensation and Emotion Network Foundation awarded to the first author.

    View full text