Perception of speech-in-noise in misophonia: Intelligibility differences between misophones and non-misophones

Misophonia is a condition in which auditory or audiovisual stimuli, called triggers, cause extreme emotional distress [Swedo et al., 2022]. Triggers are often repetitive, oro-facial in nature, and usually are caused by a human being, animal, or object. In this study, we conducted an online speech intelligibility task to measure the listeners’ (misophone and non-misophone) ability to correctly identify linguistic items in noise, which can provide insight into the differences in speech perception between groups. To investigate potential differences in these listener groups, we used 50 sentences from the Harvard Sentences, in three different noise conditions (−2, 0, + 2 dB signal-to-noise ratio). Listeners (23 misophones and 87 non-misophones) were asked to type what they heard, to the best of their ability, and their responses were analyzed for accuracy using a Levenshtein distance metric. The misophone group identified the sentences significantly better than the control group. These findings may be explained by misophones’ reported hypervigilance [Guetta et al., 2024] and the common use of masking noise devices (e.g., white noise machines, box fans, headphones) to mitigate the identification of triggers. Our results highlight a proposed difference in the perception of speech by misophones.