How does misophonia appear in children and young people?
Professor Eric Storch was one of the first researchers from a psychology background to publish scientific papers on misophonia. The papers he co-authored gave us insight into the role of anxiety in misophonia and paved the way for developing potential treatments for young people whose mental health is impacted by misophonia.
Prof. Storch’s current misophonia research, funded in the first round of the Misophonia Research Fund, will focus again on children and young people, much to the relief of misophonia parents everywhere.
His team will be using the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) to try and make sense of misophonia. The RDoC is a way of understanding mental health by looking at a range of dimensions (e.g. emotional, social) of children’s development and trying to understand how different experiences and environments might contribute to atypical development. Some examples in misophonia might include the dimensions related to feeling a sense of potential threat (this noise is a sign of some kind of danger) and feeling in control of your own body and actions (I wasn’t myself when I snatched that food from my sister’s hand).
Project title: Deep Phenotypic Characterization of Misophonia in Children and Adolescents
Main researcher: Prof. Eric Storch, Baylor College of Medicine
Funding: Misophonia Research Fund 2019, from the REAM Foundation
Time frame: project currently underway, ending June 2022
“A comprehensive approach to understanding how misophonia presents in children and adolescents within the framework of NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria, focusing on the assessment of psychopathology through the underlying processes that contribute to differences.”
Source: Misophonia Research Fund Website