In our study, we measured pupil size — a marker of arousal — while people listened to each type of noise. We found no differences across noises, suggesting they don’t reliably alter arousal in new listeners, despite popular claims.
White, pink, and brown noise are often promoted as ways to boost sleep, memory, or focus. These noises differ in their sound qualities, but it’s unclear if they actually affect us differently.
but not affective flexibility. We conclude that misophonia involves both executive inflexibility in emotional contexts and psychological rigidity through cognitive inflexibility and rumination.
We found that higher misophonia severity was associated with lower affective flexibility (switch accuracy, but not reaction time) and lower cognitive flexibility. We also found that rumination was positively related to misophonia and inversely related to cognitive flexibility,
We examined whether misophonia is linked to affective flexibility, cognitive flexibility, and rumination. One hundred and forty participants completed the Memory and Affective Flexibility Task and self-report questionnaires.
But the listener’s subjective perception of how pleasant or eventful a soundscape feels also significantly shapes this response. These findings highlight the relationship between physical sound properties and perceptual experience in shaping our reactions to acoustic environment
This study disentangles these effects by using skin conductance responses, a window into the body’s automatic, unconscious reactions, to reveal that loudness is a key driver of physiological arousal.
While loud mechanical sounds are often deemed more unpleasant than nature sounds, it remains unclear whether this response is due to loudness itself or the origin of the sound.