Conclusion
In summary, our current work shows that mimicry is widely prevalent in
misophonia and is elicited by the most common trigger sounds of eating
and chewing. These data reinforce the idea of hyper-mirroring in
misophonia proposed in our earlier work (Kumar et al., 2021). This idea
proposed that it was the action of the trigger-person and not the sounds
per se as the driving factor of distress in misophonia. By emphasizing
the action of another social agent and not the sounds which are only a
by-product of that action, the hyper-mirroring model recommends that
misophonia should be understood within the framework of social
perception and cognition, and not within an auditory framework that only
considers the sound and ignores the social source from which it
originates. These data thus have crucial implications for how we treat
and interpret misophonia moving forward.