Misophonia reactions in the general population are correlated with strong emotional reactions to other everyday sensory-emotional experiences.

Misophonic experiences are common in the general population, and they may shed light on everyday emotional reactions to multi-modal stimuli. We performed an online study of a non-clinical sample to understand the extent to which adults who have misophonic reactions are generally reactive to a range of audio-visual emotion-inducing stimuli. We also hypothesized that musicality might be predictive of one's emotional reactions to these stimuli because music is an activity that involves strong connections between sensory processing and meaningful emotional experiences.

Auditory affective processing, musicality, and the development of misophonic reactions.

Misophonia can be characterized both as a condition and as a negative affective experience. Misophonia is described as feeling irritation or disgust in response to hearing certain sounds, such as eating, drinking, gulping, and breathing. Although the earliest misophonic experiences are often described as occurring during childhood, relatively little is known about the developmental pathways that lead to individual variation in these experiences.