Perception of Annoyance Reveals Personal Biases

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Responses to disruptive behaviors can vary significantly based on personal sensitivities rather than their actual disruption level. Individuals might react with intense anger to certain noises, such as loud eating, while displaying only mild annoyance towards equally disruptive actions, like someone putting their feet on public transport seats. This discrepancy highlights how personal experiences and feelings influence the perception of rudeness, suggesting that the emotional impact of a behavior often dictates the intensity of the reaction. Such biases in reaction can stem from underlying sensitivities, exemplified in conditions like misophonia, where specific sounds trigger particularly strong responses.

Forks on teeth. Lip smacking. Metal on metal. (Don’t worry, there are no sonic examples of triggers in this episode!) Why do some of us haaaate certain noises and other folks cannot comprehend how a sound could be so irritating? Let’s meet in the middle with a professional Misophonologist, clinical psychologist, and Oxford University research fellow Dr. Jane Gregory. Dr. Gregory not only has misophonia, but has propelled research and public awareness of the condition. We lob so many questions to learn: what it feels like to have it, how many people experience it, the most common sounds that trigger it, what your brain thinks is happening, why certain people or situations may be worse than others, how to be helpful to people with misophonia, headphones, earplugs, exposure therapies, cognitive behavior therapy, experimenting on oneself, age and misophonia, and where zombies fit into it.

Visit Dr. Jane Gregory’s website and follow her on Instagram and X

Get her book, Sounds Like Misophonia: How to Stop Small Noises from Causing Extreme Reactions on Bookshop.org or Amazon

Read her papers on ResearchGate

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2024 #WorldLizardDay Programming with Dr. Earyn McGee