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Misophonic youth showed heightened attentional sensitivity (greater d', scaling with trigger count), consistent with hypervigilance and hyperarousal.

In a 2024 study, Murphy investigated attentional processing in youth with misophonia using an Immediate Memory Task adapted from the continuous performance task to assess discriminability and response bias. The authors predicted that the ex-Gaussian tau component of reaction time and heightened response sensitivity with a more liberal bias would characterize misophonia, reflecting hypervigilance. Results showed greater discriminability (d’) in the misophonia group compared to an anxiety group, a positive association between number of triggers and d’, and a moderate effect of age on d’, with no group differences in overall accuracy or reaction time. These findings support the idea that misophonia in youth is associated with heightened attentional sensitivity and hyperarousal, potentially reflecting developmental differences in executive attention. (Murphy et al., 2024)