Body

audiological evidence of trigger specific impairments to selective attention in Misophonia

In a 2018 study, Silva examined whether misophonia is associated with selective attention impairment specific to trigger sounds by comparing dichotic sentence identification (DSI) test performance across three conditions (conventional, white noise, chewing sound distractor) in misophonic (n = 10), tinnitus (n = 10), and asymptomatic (n = 20) normal-hearing participants. They found that the misophonia group performed more poorly than both control groups only on the DSI + chewing condition, with no group differences on the conventional DSI or DSI + white noise conditions. From this they concluded that selective attention may be specifically impaired in misophonic individuals when exposed to sounds that function as triggers, consistent with clinical reports of sound-specific attentional disruption in this population (Silva & Sanchez, 2019).

diagnostic focus

DSI + chewing sound task as a possible behavioral measure of Misophonia

In a 2018 study, Silva examined whether misophonia is associated with selective attention impairment specific to trigger sounds by comparing DSI test performance across three conditions (conventional, white noise, chewing sound distractor) in misophonic (n = 10), tinnitus (n = 10), and asymptomatic (n = 20) normal-hearing participants. They found that the misophonia group performed more poorly than both control groups only on the DSI + chewing condition, with no group differences on the conventional DSI or DSI + white noise conditions. although the authors do not make the following claim, the fact that DSI + chewing condition showed Misophonic specific performance drops suggests maybe it could be used as a behavioral measure of Misophonia related attentional disruption? (Silva & Sanchez, 2019).