Properties (15)

Year 2026

Abstract

Cssclasses

purpleRed

Aliases

(Du et al., 2026)

Import Date 10-13-2026

Initial Source

Misophonia

Dv Authors Yu K. Du, Kate E. Raymond, Facundo F. Lodol, Derek G.V. Mitchell, Blake E. Butler,

Dv Status #status/reviewed

Dv Limitations • Square-wave pulses do not capture the distinct acoustic properties of trigger sounds. • P50 suppression represents only one component of the broader sensory filtering system. • Heterogeneity in misophonia means the sample is unlikely to be fully representative of the broader misophonia population.

Dv Future Directions • Gating paradigms incorporating trigger sounds or trigger acoustic features (temporal patterns, spectral characteristics). • Examine cortical repetition suppression in misophonia. • Other markers such as MMN or gamma-band synchronization during active listening; MMN may be more sensitive to misophonia-specific processing differences. • Include more severe individuals and paradigms approximating real-world trigger exposure. • Broad sampling to identify a subgroup (e.g., more severe symptoms) with gating difficulty. • Longitudinal assessment of whether gating changes are a consequence rather than a cause of symptom development.

Dv Relevance • The study used a P50 EEG paradigm (paired-pulse ) to look at how early auditory processing may be different in Misophonia, but found that there was no relationship between Misophonia sensitivity, neurological indicators of early auditory processing, or self-reported gating difficulties. • The biggest takeaway is that this shows no evidence of bottom-up processing issues. With the authors theorizing a top-down cognitive processing issue is more likely.

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Audit Notes audited as review was done

Objective measures of sensory gating capacity do not predict the severity of misophonia symptoms

Status:: #status/reviewed

Metadata

Item Type: #journalArticle
Authors:: Yu K. Du, Kate E. Raymond, Facundo F. Lodol, Derek G.V. Mitchell, Blake E. Butler,
Date:
Date Added: 1772332759000
URL: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0378595526000717
DOI: 10.1016/j.heares.2026.109595
Cite Key: duObjectiveMeasuresSensory2026
Tags:: #Misophonia, #pre-proof-copy, #reviewed,
PDF Attachments

Abstract


Background/Purpose	Background- • Misophonia triggers extend beyond oronasal sounds to a broad range of repetitive human and non-human sounds, often rated as more aversive and arousing than by controls. • Triggers elicit atypical salience network activity and connectivity, suggesting excessive attribution of importance to innocuous sounds. Schröder et al. (2019) proposed that conditioned associations between sounds and arousal may promote hypervigilance, particularly for repetitive sounds with unpredictable onset and offset. • Filtering irrelevant sounds involves voluntary attentional control and automatic preattentive gating. The latter, indexed by P50 suppression, involves auditory, prefrontal, hippocampal, and thalamic regions. • Reduced P50 suppression in ADHD and ASD, alongside elevated ADHD and autistic traits in misophonia, suggests a potential shared gating deficit. Impaired filtering could increase attentional capture and salience network responses to triggers. • Beta and gamma oscillations are associated with inhibitory tone and excitation-inhibition balance, respectively, with elevated resting power linked to poorer auditory suppression and gamma activity to gating capacity and clinical symptom severity. Purpose- • Examine the relationship between strength of sensory gating and severity of specific sound sensitivity; determine whether inability to suppress repetitive auditory information at early processing stages contributes to development and maintenance of misophonic symptoms. • Test whether poorer P50 suppression correlates with higher MisoQuest scores and greater self-reported sensory gating difficulties (predicted). • Examine resting-state beta and gamma power as secondary indices of inhibitory capacity; hypothesized that altered inhibitory control or heightened cortical gain may appear as trait-level alterations in spontaneous oscillatory activity.
Participants/samples	• 48 participants (36 female, 12 male); aged 18 to 64 (mean 24.6, median 19); recruited via SONA and local advertisements. • Inclusion: 18 or older; fluent in English; self-reported normal hearing; normal or corrected-to-normal vision. • Exclusion: history of current psychological disorders, brain injuries, severe medical disorders, addiction to drugs or alcohol. • Asked to refrain from caffeine or nicotine for at least 6 hours prior. • No diagnostic groups; dimensional design across severity; 5/48 exceeded the MisoQuest clinical cutoff. • Two participants excluded for poor data quality (hardware issues), leaving 46; one further excluded from P50 analysis for no identifiable S1 peak.
Measures	• MisoQuest: 14 items rated 1 to 5; higher scores indicate more severe symptoms; 61 or greater proposed as clinical cutoff. • Sensory Gating Inventory-Brief (SGI-B): self-reported ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli; higher scores indicate poorer suppression. • AQ-10: autistic traits; not compared with EEG gating (not a continuous measure; one participant at risk using cutoff of 6). • GAD-7: anxiety symptom frequency over previous two weeks. • OCI-R: 18-item obsessive-compulsive symptom measure. • ASRS: 18 ADHD symptoms; dichotomous scoring. • Clinical measures included to clarify whether effects are specific to misophonia or attributable to overlapping symptom profiles; subsequent analyses focused on MisoQuest and SGI-B. • EEG: 32-channel BioSemi ActiveTwo. • P50 S2/S1 ratio: peak-to-preceding-trough amplitude at a frontocentral ROI (FC1, FC2, Cz, CP1, CP2) defined a priori; S2-S1 difference and N100/P200 suppression examined as supplemental/exploratory. • Resting-state beta (13 to 30 Hz) and gamma (31 to 50 Hz) log power: averaged across the same five channels.
Procedures	• Six-minute resting-state periods before and after the paired-pulse task; eyes open/closed alternated every 60 s via beep and on-screen instruction; 20 s of continuous clean data extracted per trial. • Paired-pulse task: passive listening while watching a silent movie excerpt (WALL-E); not instructed to attend to stimuli. • 100 trials of identical 50 ms square-wave pulse pairs over headphones at 100 dB peak SPL; 500 ms inter-stimulus interval; inter-trial intervals 8 to 10 s. • Preprocessing in EEGLAB: temporary re-reference; kurtosis-based bad channel removal; 0.3 to 50 Hz bandpass; average reference; ICA artifact rejection; interpolation of removed channels. • Epochs -200 to 1000 ms relative to S1 onset; baseline corrected to prestimulus 200 ms; P50 identified with findpeaks() at 40 to 80 ms (S1) and 540 to 580 ms (S2). • Missing S2 peak (suggesting suppression into the noise floor) assigned the minimum S2 peak value from the rest of the sample; missing S1 trough estimated using the S2 trough-to-peak interval. • Resting power estimated with 6-cycle Morlet wavelets (BOSC_tf()); log-transformed; no baseline correction. • Kendall’s tau correlations; Bayes factors via Savage-Dickey density ratio with uniform prior on tau; 95% credible intervals; two-tailed tests.
Results	• Sample means indicated elevated sensory gating impairment, mild generalized anxiety, minimal ADHD symptoms, minimal autistic traits, and mild OCD symptoms. • MisoQuest positively correlated with SGI-B; very strong evidence that participants reporting broader difficulty ignoring irrelevant stimuli also report more severe misophonia. • Participants showed normal P50 suppression overall. • P50 S2/S1 ratio not associated with MisoQuest (moderate evidence for null) or SGI-B (weak evidence for null); S2-S1 difference measure yielded similar results; exploratory N100/P200 suppression showed no evidence of relationship with misophonia severity. • Before the listening task, neither beta nor gamma power significantly correlated with MisoQuest; Bayes factors indicated weak evidence for an association before task onset and moderate evidence for the null. • After the listening task, beta power showed a small positive correlation with MisoQuest (weak-to-moderate evidence); gamma power not correlated (moderate evidence for null). • Authors summarize resting-state results as some evidence of association with MisoQuest prior to task onset, with likely small effect sizes.
Discussion/Limits	Conclusion- • Atypical reactivity to repetitive sounds may not arise from deficits in early, automatic sensory filtering. • Neurobiological differences likely emerge at later stages of auditory processing where cognitive and emotional evaluation occurs, consistent with altered salience network activity to triggers. • Preserved early gating may be functionally adaptive, keeping the basic capacity to filter redundant information intact; contrasts with schizophrenia, ADHD, and ASD, where P50 deficits appear to contribute to broader sensory and attention difficulties. • Selective sound sensitivity may reflect intact low-level filtering combined with altered higher-order processing of behaviourally-relevant acoustic features. • Repetition may matter not because early suppression fails but because it evokes atypical downstream activity that facilitates conditioned aversive responses. • Association of severity with self-reported but not objective gating suggests filtering difficulties not captured by objective gating measures, possibly reflecting atypical repetition suppression; prediction errors evoke salience network activity, which might explain frequent endorsement of repetitive triggers. • Null findings constrain theoretical models; cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms are more fruitful targets for research and clinical intervention.
Limitations::	• Square-wave pulses do not capture the distinct acoustic properties of trigger sounds. • P50 suppression represents only one component of the broader sensory filtering system. • Heterogeneity in misophonia means the sample is unlikely to be fully representative of the broader misophonia population.
Future Directions::	• Gating paradigms incorporating trigger sounds or trigger acoustic features (temporal patterns, spectral characteristics). • Examine cortical repetition suppression in misophonia. • Other markers such as MMN or gamma-band synchronization during active listening; MMN may be more sensitive to misophonia-specific processing differences. • Include more severe individuals and paradigms approximating real-world trigger exposure. • Broad sampling to identify a subgroup (e.g., more severe symptoms) with gating difficulty. • Longitudinal assessment of whether gating changes are a consequence rather than a cause of symptom development.
Relevance::	• The study used a P50 EEG paradigm (paired-pulse ) to look at how early auditory processing may be different in Misophonia, but found that there was no relationship between Misophonia sensitivity, neurological indicators of early auditory processing, or self-reported gating difficulties. • The biggest takeaway is that this shows no evidence of bottom-up processing issues. With the authors theorizing a top-down cognitive processing issue is more likely.

Notes

key terms and concepts

Repetition suppression- A neural phenomenon where cortical responses to repeated, identical stimuli decrease in amplitude, often interpreted as increased efficiency in recognizing and/or predicting repeated stimuli.
- Contrast with sensory gating: Sensory gating filters out irrelevant information early to prevent overload, whereas repetition suppression reflects reduced neural response due to prediction/recognition of repeated inputs. In the referenced study, misophonia severity showed no association with sensory gating issues. (page 27)
misophonia – intense negative emotional responses to specific “trigger” sounds.
sensory gating – preattentive process that filters redundant or irrelevant information before it reaches conscious awareness; thought to occur involuntarily.
paired-pulse paradigm – cortical potentials elicited by two identical sounds presented in rapid succession are compared.
P50 – earliest waveform deflection evoked by each sound; amplitude to the second sound is typically reduced relative to the first, indicating inhibition of redundant input.
P50 S2/S1 ratio – amplitude of the P50 elicited by the second stimulus divided by that elicited by the first; higher values suggest minimal gating, lower values suggest robust gating.
salience network – network that segregates important interoceptive and environmental information to guide appropriate behavioral responses.
repetition suppression – reduced amplitude of cortical activity evoked by repeated, identical stimuli; considered to reflect increased efficiency in recognizing and/or predicting subsequent occurrences of previously encountered stimuli.
dimensional approach – examining relationships across the spectrum of symptom severity rather than discrete diagnostic groups.

my engagement notes

my questions

my comments

Bookmarks

Relationship between resting state beta and gamma power and misophonia severity (page 23)
Implications for models of misophonia pathophysiology. (page 26)

reading notes

reporting inconsistencies

Pre-task Bayes factor sentence reports moderate evidence for the null “in the period after listening,” within the paragraph describing the pre-task period.
Summary paragraph states association was “prior to the onset of the listening task,” but the only significant correlation reported is post-task beta.

contextual statement

In a 2026 study, Du attempted to determine whether impaired preattentive sensory gating contributes to misophonia by relating P50 suppression in a passive paired-pulse EEG paradigm and resting-state beta and gamma power to MisoQuest and SGI-B scores in 48 adults spanning a range of misophonia severity.

summary statement

In a 2026 study, Du examined whether impaired preattentive sensory gating contributes to misophonia severity by correlating P50 suppression and resting-state beta and gamma power with MisoQuest and SGI-B scores. They found self-reported misophonia severity tracked self-reported gating difficulty, but P50 suppression was unrelated to either, and resting beta and gamma power showed at best weak relationships with symptoms. From this they concluded misophonia may not arise from deficits in early, automatic sensory filtering and likely emerges from alterations in higher-order processing networks.

Zettelkasten

the proposed breakdown of sensory gating as a factor in Misophonia failed to be supported

paired pulse paradigm to assess early auditory processing
qualifying the idea of repetitive sounds and misophonia