Measuring Misophonia: Assessing the psychometric properties of the MisoQuest and its ability to predict cognitive impacts of triggering sounds

Misophonia is a disorder involving an aversion to specific ordinary sounds, such as chewing and breathing. These “trigger” sounds are easily ignored by typically developed listeners, but elicit negative emotional reactions, physiological stress, and cognitive impairment in people with misophonia. While the severity of this reaction differs across individuals, it is often accompanied by psychological distress. Nevertheless, misophonia is not yet classified as a psychological disorder in diagnostic manuals, largely because it is unclear how it should be defined and assessed. Accordingly, the current study aimed to assess the utility of the English language version of the MisoQuest - a recently developed measure of misophonia severity - in a sample of 139 participants, including 44 people with misophonia and 95 controls (96 female, 34 male, 9 transgender/non-binary/non-conforming/agender; 90 White/Caucasian, 10 Black/African Descent, 10 East Asian, 10 South Asian, 3 Middle Eastern/Arab, 3 Latinx/Hispanic, and 13 people from mixed ethnic backgrounds). We first demonstrate that, similar to the original Polish assessment, the English MisoQuest has excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Additionally, we provide the first evidence that the MisoQuest specifically taps misophonia symptom severity rather than generalized anxiety or broader sensory sensitivities. Finally, we establish evidence of criterion validity, demonstrating that higher MisoQuest scores predict poorer performance on cognitive tasks in the presence of trigger sounds. Overall, this study indicates that the MisoQuest is a reliable and useful measure for identifying misophonia in English-speaking individuals and that scores on this measure are related to clinically relevant outcomes.