By Jennifer Langston
June 17, 2011
If you think the worst sound in the world is when one of your kids starts whining, then you’re actually scientifically correct. It turns out that whining is, indeed, the worst sound in the world to human ears. We can’t get anything done when someone is whining.
A new study in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, has found that the power of whining to distract people while doing simple math was even greater than other noises that people typically find annoying. It didn’t matter whether someone was a parent or not.
“You’re basically doing less work and doing it worse when you’re listening to the whines,” said study co-author Rosemarie Sokol Chang, a professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, everybody’s equally distracted.”
