Contribution
Assessing Hyperacusis via Questionnaire: Results from a Large (N > 200) German-Language Online Survey
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Hyperacusis is an excessive, sometimes painful response to sounds (e.g., Tyler et al., 2014) which is typically diagnosed by an audiologist or ENT clinician. In the present study, two self-report questionnaires designed to assess the presence and severity of hyperacusis were investigated in an online survey, the 9-item Hyperacusis Impact Questionnaire (HIQ), and the 5-item Sound Sensitivity Symptoms Questionnaire (SSSQ; Aazh et al., 2022). The non-clinical sample was recruited and remunerated via Prolific and consisted of N=213 participants from Germany and Austria, participating on two occasions. The first research question was whether the German-language results would replicate the psychometric properties (descriptives, internal consistency, retest reliability, factor structure) of the two questionnaires originally validated in a British clinical sample. The second research question addressed the similarities and differences between the medical diagnosis of hyperacusis and the psychological trait of (increased) noise sensitivity. Initial analyses show that while noise sensitivity is normally distributed, the distribution of hyperacusis scores is strongly skewed, with nearly half of the sample having no symptoms at all. Furthermore, the correlation between total HIQ and SSSQ scores and noise sensitivity is low, 0.30 to 0.40, suggesting that hyperacusis and noise sensitivity are distinct constructs.