Creating and Validating Stimuli to Study Misophonia

Misophonia is an impulsive, unpleasant reaction to specific sounds and is categorized under OCD. People with Misophonia experience a sensation akin to physical pain when triggered. Common triggers include nose, mouth, and throat sounds such as sniffling, chewing, and coughing. Misophonia disrupts the daily lives of those suffering from it, so studying it is essential. Our objective was to develop and validate a set of stimuli that can be used in further research of Misophonia. We identified triggers found in various research papers. We created a list of aversive and non-aversive audiovisual stimuli and made videos out of all of the stimuli on our list. Aversive and non-aversive stimuli are different from Misophonia triggers because they are generally pleasant or unpleasant whether you have Misophonia or not. The aversive and non-aversive stimuli will be used as controls in future Misophonia experiments. We generated 182 stimuli with 96 aversive/ non-aversive stimuli and 86 Misophonia-triggering stimuli. We validated the stimuli across four behavioral experiments where participants rated the stimuli on aversiveness, valance, and arousal. If most participants agreed that a certain stimulus was aversive, then we consider that stimuli validated. The experiments are currently collecting data. The final stimuli set will be used in future misophonia studies to help better understand the disorder and hopefully find a treatment for this debilitating disorder