Youth Coping and Parental Responses to Misophonia-Related Distress

Pine (2026) examined youth coping and family responses to misophonia-related distress within the control-based coping model. Surveying 85 parents of youth with misophonia symptoms, the study assessed coping strategies, involuntary stress responses, parental responses, symptom severity, and family context. Greater primary and secondary control coping were associated with lower symptom severity, while involuntary engagement and disengagement were associated with greater severity. Disengagement coping showed inconsistent associations, and parental responses were associated with greater severity and moderated the relationships between both forms of disengagement and severity. These findings provide preliminary support for applying the control-based coping model to misophonia and suggest that family-focused interventions may benefit from promoting flexible, collaborative coping strategies rather than treating individual strategies as uniformly adaptive or maladaptive (Pine et al., 2026).