The Psychological And Neural Mechanism Of Phonophobia Symptoms In College Students

The main feature of misophonia is that individuals are extremely sensitive to certain sounds in their daily living environment.Some daily noises,such as others' coughing,snuffle and plastic bag friction,are unpleasant but bearable to ordinary people.However,for misophonia patients,those sounds will trigger strong emotional reactions,including anger,the avoidance of those sounds,and changes in various physiological indicators(such as heart rate),resulting in damage to the patients' social function.Although misophonia is a newly discovered psychological problem,it has a high prevalence.Domestic and foreign studies found that the proportion of misophonia reaching the level of clinical significance was 19.9% in American undergraduates and 16.6% among Chinese undergraduates.Although some phenomenological characteristics of misophonia have been reported,the researches on the psychological mechanism and neural mechanism of misophonia are not enough,especially the empirical study on the relationship between misophonia and somatic response.Based on the above reasons,this study explored the psychological mechanism of misophonia in Chinese college students and the neural mechanism of misophonia through electrophysiological techniques.This paper includes two empirical studies:The first study is to explore the psychological mechanism of misophonia symptoms.A total of 574 college students were investigated with questionnaires to assess their misophonia symptoms,social function impairment,anger,anxiety sensitivity,obsessive-compulsive symptoms and interoception.The results showed that interoception partially mediated the relationship between the sensitivity to certain sounds and misophonia behaviors;interoception partially mediated the relationship between misophonia symptoms and state anger;and interoception through anxiety sensitivity mediated the relationship between misophonia symptoms and state anger.In addition,the results found in previous studies that anxiety mediated the relationship between misophonia symptoms and anger,and obsessive-compulsive mediated the relationship between anxiety sensitivity and misophonia severity,which had been effectively verified in the sample of Chinese college students in this study.The mediating effects of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive in the mediation models were still significant.In the second study,the event-related potential technique(ERP)was used to explore the brain nerve response of college students with different severity of misophonia to different sound stimuli.The subjects were 31 college students from the first study,12 college students with clinical misophonia in the experimental group and19 normal college students in the control group.The results showed that:(1)the N1 value of the experimental group was lower than that of the control group;(2)there were significant differences in P2 induced by sound stimulation in different locations and regions of the brain,but no differences were found in different sound types and different groups of participants at the same time;(3)under the condition of misophonia sounds,the LPC of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group;and(4)the difference wave appeared from N300 and showed a trend of moving from the frontal lobe to the occipital lobe,but the difference wave in the experimental group more covered the position of the frontal lobe,and the positive voltage in the parietal lobe,central lobe and occipital lobe was also higher than that in the control group.This study explored the role of interoception in misophonia for the first time,and found that individual awareness and perception of their own body state can affect the severity of misophonia symptoms.It was suggested that the level of interoception of patients can be used as one of the reference indexes when evaluating the symptoms of misophonia.Additionally,interoception can also be used as a target for the treatment of misophonia.There was a significant difference in LPC among college students with different severity of misophonia,indicating that misophonia patients are different from ordinary people in the treatment of misophonia sounds in the late stage of neurological response,and the results of difference wave can also support this conclusion.It was suggested that we can pay attention to patients' processing of sound information and make treatment plans better by understanding patients' understanding of sound,so as to help patients overcome their extreme reactions to daily noise in a more comprehensive way.