Reassigning sources of misophonic trigger sounds to change their unpleasantness: Testing alternative mechanisms with a new set of movies, paintings, and words

We conducted nine experiments to determine why a sound’s pleasantness can be altered by movies, abstract paintings, and words. In Expt. 1, unpleasant sounds, such as the sound of a person sniffing, were paired either with their original video track or with video tracks depicting neutral events that could plausibly have produced the sound, such as pulling tissues out of a tissue box. While the unpleasant sounds were mildly unpleasant to an unscreened population, these sounds were expected to be more unpleasant for people who have misophonia, a condition in which certain everyday sounds are unbearable. Consistent with past literature, neutral video tracks increased the sounds’ pleasantness for the non-misophonic and misophonic populations, by 0.98 and 1.59 points, respectively (on an 11-point scale). Movies rated as having better audio-visual matches produced greater changes in pleasantness, consistent with the hypothesis that source reassignment caused the changes. Expt. 2 found a consistent result when the video tracks were replaced with written event descriptions, although the effect size was reduced. Expt. 3 inverted Expt. 1 and found that unpleasant video tracks decreased the pleasantness of neutral sounds by 2.12 points, but better-matching movies did not produce greater changes in pleasantness. In Expts. 4–6, we sought an alternative to the source reassignment explanation by obtaining ratings of audio-visual synchrony, cross-modal agreement in symbolism, source plausibility, and sound identifiability. No complete explanation was found for the effect of unpleasant videos. Furthermore, pleasant abstract paintings increased the pleasantness of unpleasant sounds by 0.37 points, correlating with cross-modal agreement but not with audio-visual match. Taken together, different types and patterns of match ratings can help discern the causal mechanisms by which visual stimuli affect sound pleasantness (e.g., source reassignment, cross-modal agreement).