HIGHLY SENSITIVE:
IS IT THE SAME AS BEING SHY OR INTROVERTED?
Recently, several celebrities have announced that they are ‘highly sensitive people’. What does this term mean, and how can you spot the signs?
Last year the singer Lorde became the latest celebrity to identify as a “highly sensitive person”, telling Vogue that her personality profile means that she just “isn’t built for pop star life” and that she needs long stretches of time to be by herself to recover from the demands of her work.
Lorde joins other superstars, such as Kanye West and Nicole Kidman, who have also labelled themselves in this way, apparently finding that it helps them make sense of their own experiences.
WHEN DID THE TERM ‘HIGHLY SENSITIVE PERSON’ ARISE?
These celebs did not invent the term ‘highly sensitive person’. It originated in an obscure 1996 counselling paper by the US psychologist Elaine Aron and then gained traction in a much-cited 1997 research paper that she co-authored with her husband Arthur Aron, in which the pair claimed the highly sensitive personality profile was related to, but different from, being shy or introverted.
Moreover, a key feature of being a highly sensitive person, they observed, is having “sensory processing sensitivity”.
WHAT IS SENSORY PROCESSING SENSITIVITY?
Based on interviews that the two Arons conducted with dozens of sensitive students, they concluded that having sensory processing sensitivity manifests in various ways, including being more sensitive than usual to “subtleties, the arts, caffeine, hunger, pain, change, overstimulation, strong sensory input, others’ moods, violence in the media, and being observed”.
Overall, highly sensitive people – which the Arons estimated accounts for between 15 to 20 per cent of us – are more affected by the external world than average, they reflect on and process things more deeply, and they are more empathic.
It’s worth noting there’s a related concept in the psychological literature, but one that’s focused more on kids. It states that a minority of children are like ‘orchids’, in being highly sensitive to the environment of their upbringing – wilting when it’s challenging and thriving when it’s supportive.
This is in contrast to the ‘dandelion’ majority, who outside of neglect, mostly do just okay, regardless of their positive or negative circumstances.
HOW CAN I DETERMINE IF I’M HIGHLY SENSITIVE?
As part of their investigations, the Arons created a new personality test, aptly named the Highly Sensitive Person Scale. To find out if you’re a highly sensitive person, see if you agree with some of these example items from the scale: Are you easily overwhelmed by strong sensory input?
Do other people’s moods affect you? Are you particularly sensitive to the effect of caffeine? Do you find it unpleasant to have a lot going on at once? Do you startle easily? Are you bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises or chaotic scenes?
You probably get the picture. There are 27 items like these in the formal scale – and the more you agree with, the more likely that you are a highly sensitive person (if you want to delve deeper, Aron also has a free test on her website, hsperson.com).
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE HIGHLY SENSITIVE?
The Arons and their research colleagues believe that being a highly sensitive person runs in families and that it has a biological basis, including a greater than usual sensitivity to stress. At a neural level, several brain-imaging studies have identified differences in highly sensitive people compared with controls, such as increased activity in higher-order visual processing regions during visual tasks, and greater activity in empathy-related neural regions when looking at images of a partner’s face.
“Studies have identified brain differences in highly sensitive people compared with controls”
In a review they published in 2019, Aron and her colleagues stated that “high sensory processing sensitivity individuals may readily intuit, ‘feel’ and integrate information, and respond to others’ affective states…”, although they also acknowledged that research into the biological basis and causes of being a highly sensitive person is “still in its infancy”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, another line of research has documented that highly sensitive people are at increased risk of psychological and emotional difficulties; there are also still-to-be-worked-out links between the sensitive personality profile and conditions such as autism, which also frequently involves heightened sensory sensitivity.
HOW CAN HIGHLY SENSITIVE PEOPLE COPE WITH STRESS OR FEELINGS OF BEING OVERWHELMED?
If you think you might be a highly sensitive person, Aron and her colleagues have stated that you might be especially likely to benefit from mindfulness-based interventions to help you cope with feelings of stress or being overwhelmed, or indeed any kind of intervention that gives you tools for managing your emotions and emotional reactivity (you could consider cognitive behavioural therapy, for instance, or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy). According to Aron and her collaborators, recognising that you are a highly sensitive person could be an important first step.
If the concept of a highly sensitive person resonates with you and helps you manage your own mental health, that’s surely a good thing. But it’s worth also noting that from a scientific perspective, the concept is not without its critics. Many personality researchers believe the highly sensitive person concept is really not so different from being a strong introvert, highly emotionally reactive (i.e. highly neurotic) and open to experiences – all aspects of personality that are already captured by the popular and well-established Big Five model of personality. For instance, in a detailed statistical critique published last year, a pair of German psychologists concluded that while the Arons’ influential paper from 1997 “provided some interesting ideas” it’s also the case that “the empirical basis for sensory processing sensitivity is currently weak”.
Christian is a cognitive neuroscientist, science writer and author.