ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2026
Differential brain responses to affective sounds in misophonia and hyperacusis: A task-based fMRI approach.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans are naturally attuned to emotionally salient sounds, such as screams signaling danger, which trigger survival-related responses. In sound-sensitivity disorders, such as misophonia and hyperacusis, everyday sounds provoke intense emotional and behavioral reactions. Misophonia is typically triggered by specific sounds, such as chewing, whereas hyperacusis involves hypersensitivity to sounds above certain intensity thresholds. Because these disorders share overlapping symptoms and frequently co-occur, disentangling their neural bases is essential for improving diagnosis and treatments. We recruited 91 young adults categorized into four groups: misophonia, hyperacusis, comorbid misophonia and hyperacusis, and controls. We conducted task-based fMRI, where participants listened to 90 emotionally valenced sounds from the International Affective Digitized Sounds-2 database and rated their valence during scanning. Whole-brain functional activation and seed-to-voxel functional connectivity analyses revealed both distinct and overlapping pattern of neural correlates associated with these disorders. The misophonia group, regardless of comorbid hyperacusis (relative to controls), showed hyperactivation in visual association areas and reduced connectivity between salience and visual networks during unpleasant versus neutral sound processing. This suggests atypical cross-modal sensory involvement. The hyperacusis group exhibited reduced connectivity between salience hubs and frontal control regions compared to misophonia and controls, indicating impaired top-down regulation. In contrast, this connectivity was preserved in misophonia for generally unpleasant sounds, suggesting intact regulation. The comorbid group showed neural patterns associated with both disorders. Overall, these findings reveal overlapping and disorder-specific neural patterns across sound tolerance profiles. Future research should combine neural and behavioral data to refine mechanistic models and guide targeted interventions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.