ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1569598
Visual Disgust Constricts Pupils in Response to Misophonic Movies
Provisionally accepted
- Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa, United States
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Misophonia is a condition typically described as heightened intolerance to specific everyday sounds, although intense emotional and physiological responses can also be triggered by nonauditory representations of the sources of these sounds, e.g., words, videos, or imagination (Swedo et al., 2022). We asked whether pupillometry could provide an objective pupillary signature of the reactions of disgust and anger towards misophonic events depicted in movies. We found greater pupil constriction towards movies with more visually disgusting video tracks, both for misophonic and non-misophonic individuals, whereas movies with a video track suggesting a neutral source of a misophonic sound (e.g., Samermit et al. (2022), Heller et al. (2025)) increased both the sound pleasantness ratings and the pupil diameters. Furthermore, repeated exposure to the same sounds in different movies changed pupil responses such that they diverged from the ratings of sound unpleasantness. The findings of this study may provide valuable insights into the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of misophonia.
Keywords: misophonia, disgust, Auditory-visual, Pupillometry, Everyday sounds, Cognition, emotion, reappraisal
Received: 01 Feb 2025; Accepted: 02 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Qiu, Park, Oszczapinska and Heller. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Laurie M. Heller, Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 15213, Pa, United States
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