Construction noise, children screaming, barking dogs - some people can relax wonderfully with such a background noise, maybe even sleep. Others are very sensitive to background noise. Even a loud TV can stress them out. Our sense of hearing and how sensitive it is to sounds varies greatly. And as a new study has now shown, there is also a strong connection with our personality.
Researchers at the University of Lübeck have examined hearing ability in connection with certain character traits. The 1,000 participants in the study were primarily asked about their emotional lability, i.e. their tendency to worry a lot.
Study: If you worry a lot, you hear better
The result: people who tend to brood have better hearing than those who are more relaxed. And that not only applies to the subjective perception of hearing, i.e. how sensitively someone reacts to disturbing noises, but also to the objective one. To do this, the test persons had to solve a difficult listening task, and the worried ones among them actually mastered it better. "Our results show that personality is an important component in understanding discrepancies between subjective and objective hearing performance," explains study leader Dr. Malte Woestmann.
The result surprised even the researchers: it was to be expected that emotionally more unstable people would feel disturbed by noise more quickly. But the fact that the brooding people actually have better hearing physically is an exciting finding. Perhaps this fact has something to do with the fact that they are more attentive and mindful overall. Sometimes maybe even more than you would like...
But one thing is for sure: overthinkers no longer need to be accused of being too sensitive to background noise – after all, we now know that they really can hear better. All that remains to be said: Cheers to noise-cancelling headphones!
