Misophonia being made entirely of normal emotional responses and Pavlovian conditioning may be a slightly uncomfortable proposition for some. We’ve had a hard enough time getting misophonia properly recognised, and this idea seems to concur with the dismissive attitude that misophonics are “just being sensitive”.
The other side of the coin is that it validates the idea that we know a miso trigger when we see one. Whole-person involvement and Pavlovian conditioning completely frees misophonia from any narrow neurological definition. “You’re really triggering my misophonia right now” — in response to no particular easily-identifiable sensory stimulus — cannot be dismissed as “using misophonia to get one’s way”.
Ultimately I embrace knowing what misophonia is. That miso may boil down to Pavlovian conditioning and normal emotional responses doesn’t make the experience of it any less bad — although in a way I think it actually might, as I described in How Emotions Are Made. Instead, it serves as an indicator of the power of an unwanted reflex to generate serious emotional distress.
Both sufferers and non-sufferers are better for knowing more about how miso works.
On being sensitive: I actually find myself agreeing with the idea that general sensitivity may play a large part in (some) misophonia, whereas before I was adamant on cleanly separating it as its own condition — separate from personality as well as other hearing-related conditions such as tinnitus and hyperacusis.
It may be useful — but also potentially dangerous — to develop a notion of a “misophonic personality”. Along the lines of my whole-person ideas, basically anything and everything could flow into the input side for making us prone to trigger acquisition — some examples:
- Trauma
- Personality
- Sensitivity
- Sensory processing disorder
- OCD
- Inherent qualities of stimulus (texture of sound, etc)
- Emotional significance (incidental/random in origin)
- Context
- Background stress levels
- Relationship history/dynamics
- Value judgements, etiquette, social norms
- Stimulus’s relationship/similarity to existing triggers, possibly via complex/abstract conceptual connections
- Personal tastes/preferences
- Rigidity
- Family dynamics
- Physical tension
- General health
- Interoceptive sensibility
Perhaps hypermirroring is also a possible factor feeding into the input side–not as a necessary or sufficient ingredient of misophonia, but as another variable that can make a person more or less prone to developing reflexes.
