Body

In a 2024 study, Hansen reported that exposure to aversive sounds is associated with impairments in social and cognitive judgments, particularly in individuals with misophonia. The findings showed that misophonic aversion extends beyond oral triggers to include non-oral sounds, and that explicit identification of a sound modulates perceived discomfort across the general population, with these effects being amplified in misophonia. Misophonia was also linked to generalized performance deficits on basic tasks such as gender judgment, suggesting broader cognitive interference. Importantly, trait and likeability judgments were selectively influenced by explicit source memory for the sounds in misophonia, indicating that social evaluations are shaped by conscious sound–source appraisal. Overall, the results suggest that when misophonic individuals experience sustained discomfort, their social and cognitive judgments are reliably disrupted.(Hansen et al., 2024)