Nails on a chalkboard. Loud breathing. Sneezing. These sounds can often be irritating and leave ears ringing with discomfort. But for people with misophonia, a decreased tolerance for specific sounds and stimuli, those noises can be physically debilitating.
Heather Hansen, assistant professor of psychological sciences at William & Mary, knows this problem professionally and personally, as she has it herself. Through her work in her first year at the Cognition and Auditory Perception of Everyday Sounds (CAPES) Lab at William & Mary, she aims to dig deeper into the prevalence of the underdiscussed diagnosis and what people can do to mitigate it.
Hansen recently spoke with W&M News about the disorder, the unique tools William & Mary provides to aid her work and the role that students are playing in the research. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How did you get into your field of research?
A. I was fascinated by studying the human brain and what we can learn from it. I think there were maybe two research articles on misophonia when I was in school, so I took a shot in the dark, and I said, “All right, if other people aren’t going to study it, I will.” I got through my Ph.D. at Ohio State, then I went to Montreal for a couple of years, where I worked at a giant neurological institute in Montreal and did more research with the brain and misophonia and learned through that experience that I was ready to have my own lab.
Q. What made you choose William & Mary to conduct your research?
A. I really enjoy the kind of small, intimate community of William & Mary where the students have one-on-one time with professors. I already have a lab full of undergrads who are so eager and so willing to put in work and come to meetings and ask brilliant questions. That is really neat to me! I don’t have to pull them to come do this work; they want to do it themselves. It’s cool.
I also knew William & Mary had a really strong psychological sciences department focused on a variety of sensory fields. They have a professor who does odor and taste and people who study vision, but no one studied auditory processing. So it was a niche that I could kind of slot myself into pretty well.
I’m already collaborating with those folks in the department. I like how collaborative the environment is, and everyone’s so supportive of each other. So it’s a really friendly environment to work in.
I already have a lab full of undergrads who are so eager and so willing to put in work and come to meetings and ask brilliant questions. I don’t have to force them to come do this – they want to learn. It’s cool.
Q. For people who don’t know what misophonia is, how would you define it?
A. I would say misophonia is an inability to block out certain background noises, or an intolerance for certain noises in the background that most people can habituate to and get used to. For example, it’s the way that if you were to hear someone scrape nails on a chalkboard, you would get this feeling, like, “I need to leave immediately. I have to cover my ears. Make that stop.” But it’s for more mundane things like a clock ticking or someone chewing their food or just kind of innocuous environmental noises, so it’s the desire to escape.
Q. Is this field of study new?
A. Misophonia was technically coined in 2001 by some audiologists. But nothing really happened with it until about 2013, when the first research started happening. We didn’t actually have a definition of it formally until 2022 — that was when a group of experts came together and said, “Here’s what we know; here’s what we’re calling it.”
Q. What specifically are you looking at now in your lab research?
A. Lots of my prior work demonstrates that if you present sounds to people, they’re going to be bothered by a wide variety of things. If you look in the brain, you’re going to find it connected in a lot of different ways. It’s just a very widespread type of condition, rather than a very specific phenomenon. So I’ve put together a sound bank with some colleagues to help researchers out with that task. One of the things I have some undergrads working on is helping to expand that, because the bigger it is, the better.
I’ve also just got a group of students who are looking at neuroimaging with me, so we’re looking at an open-access database of brain scans and applying some surveys to figure out folks who are high on sound sensitivity, what their brains look like. Lastly, I’m setting up just regular behavioral testing. So I’m looking at, if I bring someone into the lab and I present certain sounds and I put different visuals on the screen, can I make that sound less bothersome to you? What happens if I play the sound from in front of you versus from behind you?
Q. Are there any misconceptions about misophonia?
A. It’s not just like, “Oh man, that person’s so rude chewing.” By then, it’s disabling. There are cases of, “I don’t leave my house anymore. I’ve had to switch careers. I can’t eat in the office cafeteria anymore. My cubicle mate’s typing super loudly, so I can’t even work in the office.”
I think it is helpful to know there are actually things going on in the brain we can show now with evidence that are different about you. It’s not just you being particular and needing to get over it.
Q. What would you say to people who think they may have misophonia and want to learn more?
A. You’re not alone. This is a thing that a lot of people experience. I would encourage someone to search online sites like Reddit, for instance. You’ll notice a lot of people experience this. So you’re not alone if you want to scroll through and get validation. But there are also some really cool advocacy support groups that help to both fund research to connect people together, to help with clinical advancements. There’s one called soQuiet that I am on the board of. They don’t pay me to say this, but I think they are great one that helps to legitimize the condition and also helps to enact, for instance, ADA accommodations in schools.
Q. What’s next for you?
A. We’ll be setting up research workstations in the lab, so there’ll be computers. I’m soundproofing testing rooms so that we can start collecting auditory experiment data, and I’ll also have skin conductance equipment in that lab (for testing). So just moving forward, I hope to do more daily data collection of undergrads or community members and more of the actual nitty-gritty work.
William Oster, Communications Specialist