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using longitudinal designs to asses roles of cognitive rigidity and rumination in the emergence of Misophonia and the separability of cog vs affective flexibility

Black et al. (2026) examined the relationships between misophonia severity, affective flexibility, cognitive flexibility, and rumination, finding that all three independently predicted severity and that rumination partially mediated the effect of cognitive rigidity. From this, they suggest future work should employ longitudinal or experimental designs to establish whether rigidity and rumination causally contribute to misophonia or emerge from repeated trigger exposure, use multi-method approaches to clarify whether cognitive and affective inflexibility are genuinely separable constructs, and include non-affective switching tasks to confirm that the observed flexibility deficits are specific to emotional context rather than reflecting general task-switching impairment (Black et al., 2026).