Women suffering from stress-related exhaustion exhibit hypersensitivity to sounds when exposed to stress. In some cases, a sound level corresponding to a normal conversation can be perceived as painful. This according to a study from Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University’s Stress Research Institute which tested sensitivity to sounds immediately after a few minutes’ artificially induced stress.
The study, which is published in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE, involved exposing 348 people (208 women and 140 men) between the ages of 23 and 71 with low, medium or high levels of ’emotional exhaustion’ to five minutes of experimentally induced physical (hand in ice), mental (performance on a stress test) and social (being observed) stress. The results show that women with a high level of emotional exhaustion exhibit higher sound sensitivity after an experimentally induced stress exposure than those who were not exhausted. Some even experienced sound levels as low as 60 decibels, the level of normal conversation, as uncomfortably loud.
People with a low level of exhaustion, on the other hand, became less sensitive to sound immediately after being exposed to five minutes’ stress, a phenomenon that the researchers describe as “shutting their ears” – a normal stress reaction. The same trends could be observed in men, but the differences were not statistically significant.
The researchers also point out that, interestingly, there was no difference in sensitivity to sounds between the groups prior to the stress exposure.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130115085533.htm
