Study on hearing + personality
Those who brood a lot hear better
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Do you also constantly hear your neighbors in the apartment trampling over you? How sensitive your hearing is also depends on certain character traits.
There are people who can at least concentrate on reading with construction noise, children screaming and loud barking dogs, and maybe even sleep without any problems. And then there are people who already find the wind whistling too loud or the television in the neighboring apartment very annoying. The sensitivity of our hearing is very different. And like one new study has now found out, it is also related to our personality.
A group of researchers from the University of Lübeck examined hearing ability in connection with certain character traits. In particular, they did personality tests on the emotional instability of the more than 1,000 participants. People with high levels of this trait tend to worry more than others.
Study shows: people who worry more hear better
The result: Both subjective and objective hearing ability was better in people who were more prone to brooding than in more relaxed contemporaries. And even with a difficult listening task, the test subjects were able to demonstrate a better objective sense of hearing. “Our results show that personality is an important building block for understanding discrepancies in subjective and objective hearing performance,” explains Dr. Study director Malte Wöstmann.
In terms of subjective hearing, the result was perhaps still to be expected – after all, emotionally unstable people would also be assessed as more sensitive in other areas. But it is surprising that brooders can actually, physically, hear better inside. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they are more attentive to the world as a whole. Often perhaps even more attentive than they would like …
In any case, the brooding overthinker no longer needs to blame anyone for being too sensitive to loud noises – after all, it has now been scientifically proven that they ACTUALLY hear better. All that remains to be said is: cheers for noise-canceling headphones!
Source used: uni-luebeck.de