Costs of suppressing emotional sound and countereffects of a mindfulness induction: an experimental analog of tinnitus impact

Tinnitus is the experience of sounds without an appropriate external auditory source. These auditory sensations are intertwined with emotional and attentional processing. Drawing on theories of mental control, we predicted that suppressing an affectively negative sound mimicking the psychoacoustic f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-05, Vol.8 (5), p.e64540-e64540
Main Authors: Hesser, Hugo, Molander, Peter, Jungermann, Mikael, Andersson, Gerhard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Acoustics
Adolescent
Adult
Arithmetic
Attention
Attention task
Behavior
Biology
Brain research
Cognitive ability
Dependent variables
Drawing and ironing
emotional sound
Emotions
Female
Hearing
Humans
Male
Mathematics
Medicin och hälsovetenskap
Memory
Mental control
Mimicry
Mindfulness
Neurosciences
Pain
Predictive control
Self control
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sound
suppression
Surveys and Questionnaires
Tinnitus
Tinnitus - psychology
Young Adult
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Summary:Tinnitus is the experience of sounds without an appropriate external auditory source. These auditory sensations are intertwined with emotional and attentional processing. Drawing on theories of mental control, we predicted that suppressing an affectively negative sound mimicking the psychoacoustic features of tinnitus would result in decreased persistence in a mentally challenging task (mental arithmetic) that required participants to ignore the same sound, but that receiving a mindfulness exercise would reduce this effect. Normal hearing participants (N = 119) were instructed to suppress an affectively negative sound under cognitive load or were given no such instructions. Next, participants received either a mindfulness induction or an attention control task. Finally, all participants worked with mental arithmetic while exposed to the same sound. The length of time participants could persist in the second task served as the dependent variable. As hypothesized, results indicated that an auditory suppression rationale reduced time of persistence relative to no such rationale, and that a mindfulness induction counteracted this detrimental effect. The study may offer new insights into the mechanisms involved in the development of tinnitus interference. Implications are also discussed in the broader context of attention control strategies and the effects of emotional sound on task performance. The ironic processes of mental control may have an analog in the experience of sounds.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0064540