Reassigning sources of misophonic trigger sounds to change their unpleasantness: Testing alternative mechanisms with a new set of movies, paintings, and words.

ABSTRACT: We conducted nine experiments to determine why a sound's pleasantness can be altered by movies, abstract paintings, and words. In Expt. 1, unpleasant sounds, such as the sound of a person sniffing, were paired either with their original video track or with video tracks depicting neutral events that could plausibly have produced the sound, such as pulling tissues out of a tissue box. While the unpleasant sounds were mildly unpleasant to an unscreened population, these sounds were expected to be more unpleasant for people who have misophonia, a condition in which certain everyday sounds are unbearable. Consistent with past literature, neutral video tracks increased the sounds' pleasantness for the non-misophonic and misophonic populations, by 0.98 and 1.59 points, respectively (on an 11-poin

SUBMITTER: Heller LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12007711 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature