Authors: Hamssika Sudhakar¹; Prashanth Prabhu¹
¹All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
Background: Misophonia is characterized by abnormally strong emotional or physiological responses to specific sounds. Evidence suggests that this emotional reactivity adversely affects auditory attention and speech perception in noise. This study aimed to investigate speech perception in noise among individuals with misophonia using the Audible Contrast Threshold (ACT) test.
Method: Twenty participants were divided into a misophonia group (n = 10) and a control group (n = 10). Misophonia was identified using Schröder’s criteria (2014) and severity was assessed via the AMISOS-R scale. Participants underwent pure-tone audiometry and the ACT test using MedRx software.
Results: Both groups demonstrated normal hearing sensitivity. An independent-samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference in ACT scores between the misophonia group (M = 1.67 dB) and the control group (M = -0.54 dB), with p = 0.006). A large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.40) indicated that individuals with misophonia required significantly higher contrast to understand speech in noise compared to the control group.
Conclusion: Elevated ACT scores in the misophonia group suggest that heightened emotional reactivity may interfere with central auditory processing in degraded listening conditions. These results emphasize the importance of including speech-in-noise assessments in the audiological evaluation of individuals with misophonia to better characterize their auditory profile.
