Not just disgust: Network-based and seed-to-voxel insular connectivity distinguishes misophonia from disgust sensitivity and related clinical measures

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Heather A Hansen¹ (heather.hansen@concordia.ca), Charles S Ferris², Zeynep M Saygin³; ¹Concordia University, ²McGill University, ³The Ohio State University

Misophonia, a newly-defined disorder of extreme aversion to certain sounds, affects roughly 20% of the general population. Recent neuroimaging evidence has reported patterns of abnormal activity and connectivity in the insula in misophonic individuals, suggesting potential differences in underlying attentional or emotional-disgust processes. How does the insula connect to other functional networks while at rest, and does this pattern of connectivity lend insight into misophonia’s relationship to other disorders? To address this question, we analyzed resting-state data from 22 adults assessed for misophonia, disgust sensitivity, OCD, depression, and stress. Whole-brain region-to-region network-based connectivity revealed an increase in connectivity between the left and right insula as misophonia level increased, supporting the role of the insula in misophonia symptom presentation. Next, we used the insula as a seed for a whole-brain seed-to-voxel connectivity analysis and observed that misophonia level was significantly related to connectivity from the insula to a cluster extending to the operculum, putamen, and Heschl’s gyrus. To investigate whether this pattern matched that of putatively related clinical disorders, we performed the same analysis for disgust sensitivity, OCD, depression, and stress. None of these individual measures produced significant clusters overlapping the regions found using misophonia level. These results support and replicate the importance of the insula in understanding misophonic aversion and additionally provide tentative evidence that misophonia is a discrete disorder. Understanding the neural basis of misophonia could not only inform treatment, but also lead to new insights into the function of the insula in health and disorder.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions