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.