It's official: Whining IS the most annoying sound in the world
A study found that whining is the most effective way of distracting people carrying out elementary cognitive tasks. - The sound of fingernails on a blackboard, people having loud conversations on mobile phones in public - the list of things that annoy us is extensive. But, as has long been suspected, the sound of a child whining is the most irritating in the world to adults, according to scientists. Participants who were asked to do simple subtraction while listening to a range of noises - including machine noise, infant cries and neutral speech - made more mistakes and completed fewer problems while listening to the whines of a child. '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. The results weren't affected by the gender of participants, or whether or not they had children of their own. 'It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, everybody’s equally distracted,' said Chang.