Background:

The process of habituation often remains obscure to those patients most disturbed by tinnitus.

Since three decades, the Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has promoted a habituation model (Hallam et al. 1984) founded on experimental data regarding the orienting response (OR) (Horvath 1980). Habituation of the OR is the natural extinction of attention to repeated identical stimuli which lose their ability to trigger orientation. Considering epidemiological data, the habituation model (Hallam & McKenna, 2006) hypothesizes that:

1. tolerance is “a natural and inevitable process” illustrated by three quarter of people with tinnitus;

2. annoyance is “a consequence of a failure to cease attending” to tinnitus, because of psycho-physiological factors that delay a natural process to occur (i.e., extinction of the OR)