Diminished N1 Auditory Evoked Potentials to Oddball Stimuli in Misophonia Patients

Abstract

Misophonia (hatred of sound) is a newly defined psychiatric condition in which ordinary human sounds, such as breathing and eating, trigger impulsive aggression. In the current study, we investigated if a dysfunction in the brain’s early auditory processing system could be present in misophonia. We screened 20 patients with misophonia with the diagnostic criteria for misophonia, and 14 matched healthy controls without misophonia, and investigated any potential deficits in auditory processing of misophonia patients using auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) during an oddball task. Subjects watched a neutral silent movie while being presented a regular frequency of beep sounds in which oddball tones of 250 and 4000 Hz were randomly embedded in a stream of repeated 1000 Hz standard tones. We examined the P1, N1, and P2 components locked to the onset of the tones. For misophonia patients, the N1 peak evoked by the oddball tones had smaller mean peak amplitude than the control group. However, no significant differences were found in P1 and P2 components evoked by the oddball tones. There were no significant differences between the misophonia patients and their controls in any of the ERP components to the standard tones. The diminished N1 component to oddball tones in misophonia patients suggests an underlying neurobiological deficit in misophonia patients. This reduction might reflect a basic impairment in auditory processing in misophonia patients.

Effects of Speech Phonological Features during Passive Perception on Cortical Auditory Evoked Potential in Sensorineural Hearing Loss

“…This suggested the encoding deficits in auditory processing information of hearing impaired subjects. Our finding agreed with that of the previous studies where the low-level of N1 auditory response was found in subjects with misophonia and aphasia (Becker & Reinvang 2013;Schröder et al 2014). These similarities suggested that the center auditory process of sensorineural of the subject might interfere with some speech perception disorder.…”

“…The result of P1 component reported here fostering similarity with the previous finding where the average amplitude elicited from the SNHL subject was higher than the control group for both stimuli (Schröder et al 2014). The previous study emphasized the difficulty to assess accurately the P1 component due to the interaction with C1 waves from a visual event-related potential (VERP) component which created a major overlapping mechanism with the P1 CAEP component (Luck 2005).…”

“…Components of CAEP constituting the neuronal linguistic processes are associated with words and sentences, depends entirely on the acoustic continuum so as to discriminate with the desired neural pattern of perception. Generally, measurements of CAEPs response strength (amplitude) and timing window (latency) can provide objective information in terms of auditory processing underlie speech perception in normal as well as in difficult-to-test patients (Arsenault & Buchsbaum 2015;Pratt et al 2009;Schröder et al 2014). Previous study elucidated that CAEPs testing could provide productive responses in assessing auditory pathway without requiring cooperation (passive) from the subjects (Agung et al 2006).…”

“…Difficulty was found in discriminating longer time-varying acoustic cues in speech language. More clinical application was carried out by Schröder et al (2014). They justified the efficacy of CAEPs response in evaluating dysfunctionality of the brain's early auditory processing system in subjects with misophonia.…”

A Large‐Scale Study of Misophonia

“…The reported disproportional aversive experience has been validated by finding an increased autonomic response (as measured with GSR 1 ) to trigger sounds, but not to corresponding visual stimuli, in misophonic participants compared with nonmisophonic participants (Edelstein et al, 2013). Furthermore, the reported sensory sensitivity has been corroborated with an altered early physiological signal (auditory N100) measured in an oddball paradigm with electroencephalogram (Schröder et al, 2014).…”