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Prior null flexibility findings in misophonia may stem from emotionally neutral tasks; the affect-laden MAFT was designed to surface deficits that neutral tasks like the WCST and Stroop miss.

in a 2026 study, Black et al. identify five non-exclusive explanations for prior null or inconsistent task-based flexibility findings in misophonia: definitional inconsistency across studies, methodological and reporting biases, context-specificity of deficits to trigger stimuli, poor correspondence between self-report and neuropsychological task measures, and use of emotionally neutral stimuli insufficient to recruit affective switching processes. The Stroop-trigger specificity finding from (Daniels et al., 2020) and the null WCST result from (Abramovitch et al., 2023) are both consistent with the view that general-purpose neutral flexibility tasks miss the affective dimension central to misophonic reactivity. The MAFT was selected specifically to address the emotionally neutral-task limitation by embedding switching demands within affectively valenced material, with the hypothesis that this context is necessary to surface flexibility impairments (Black et al., 2026).