Role of Habituation and Sensitization in Understanding the Annoyance of Community Exposures to Impulsive Noise

摘要

Personnel must consider the effect of the noises their activities produce. Understanding and predicting how people react to such common military noise as gunfire or explosive blasts is important, since nearby civilian populations and their opinions of military operations can affect future military operations and facility expansions. The problem this report addresses is determining those factors which are the best predictors of whether someone will be annoyed by noise. To better select the most valuable predictors for annoyance to military noise, a review of published international studies on the subject was done. One possible predictor is a physiological process known as 'habituation,' in which the brain stops responding to repeated stimuli. This review then goes beyond habituation to include the roles of the dual process theory and individual sensitization, both of which can influence reported annoyance. This work concludes with recommendations of what military planners and their research teams should consider in order to obtain the most reliable results from future studies of annoyance to military noise. Those recommendations include specific suggestions for designing new surveys that better explain relationships between individual characteristics or situations, and the same individual's annoyance to noise.