A few minutes into the final exam for my psychology class, I realized I had made a poor decision about where to sit. Of course, I couldn’t have predicted that the student seated on my right would spend the next two and a half hours shaking his leg nonstop. The seats were bolted to the floor, so all I could do was lean to the left slightly to try to keep his incessant fidgeting out of my line of sight.
Each time I got to a new question, I tried to shield my eyes with the palm of my hand, trying to think of the answer as quickly as possible. But no matter what I did, there was his leg bobbing away in my peripheral vision.
Turns out, I was experiencing a psychological phenomenon called misokinesia, which means “hatred of movements.”
Misokinesia is “an aversive reaction to seeing small, repetitive movements by others, such as fidgeting with a pen or tapping a foot,” says Sumeet Jaswal, a PhD candidate and instructor at Langara College in Vancouver. As lead author of the
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