Sound-evoked pupil dilation quantifies misophonic symptoms

Abstract

Misophonia is a debilitating disorder where seemingly innocuous sounds (often human made, such as chewing or throat clearing) evoke intense negative cognitive, emotional and physical “fight-or-flight” responses. Recent studies reported alarmingly high prevalence across different countries and population characteristics, revealing an urgent need for a better understanding of this condition as well as improved measurement and diagnostic tools. First, current misophonia symptom measurements rely on (subjective) self-reports, and different studies employ various diagnostic approaches and cut-off scores. There is an urgent need for a complementary (objective) psychophysiological measurement tool. Second, the role of “mild” or “moderate” symptoms is currently topic of debate: are they still manifestations of the misophonic disorder? Here, we employ pupillometry to map out arousal responses to misophonia trigger sounds. We show that (i) pupil dilation can reliably differentiate misophonic responses from responses to generally unpleasant sounds (such as nails on chalk board), (ii) the “milder cases” of misophonia still show arousal responses characteristic of misophonia, and (iii) pupillometry can even be used to aid diagnosis in an individual; based on only pupil dilation, misophonic symptom severity could be reliably predicted at the level of a single individual. We conclude that even mild misophonic responses can reliably, objectively and cost-effectively be indexed by pupil-linked arousal.