Do you often react more emotionally than other people? Do you regularly shed tears at a happy ending in the cinema? Can a flippant remark trigger a flood of feelings in you? And have your fellow human beings told you more than once that you are hypersensitive? If this sensitivity is not only limited to the emotional world, but also to stimuli such as loud noises or bright light, then you may be highly sensitive.
Descriptions of extremely sensitive people already existed in the literature of the 19th century, for example in the works of Goethe, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters. The phenomenon is still controversial. Some see it a pseudo self-diagnosis of people looking for recognition or attention. The others understand a characteristic of personality: High sensitivity therefore describes people who react significantly more than others to their environment, both emotionally and sensory towards stimuli such as light and sounds, smells and touch.
For a long time observed behavioral researchers are that many animal species have individuals who are extremely sensitive to stimuli from their surroundings. This idea of a special "environmental sensitivity" was adopted by several psychological theories in the 1990s. The best known among them is Elaine Aron's theory: the US psychologist described people who are sensitive to sensory stimuli in different ways as highly sensitive. According to Aron, this sensitivity in sensory processing (Sensory Processing Sensitivity, PLC) has many facets: a lower perception threshold, the tendency to be overwhelmed by sensations, a greater awareness of fine changes in the environment, an increased excitability and a pronounced one Empathy.
Sensitivity is a continuum with many intermediate stages
The pioneer Elaine Aron means a neurologically related temperament with different characteristics, but only distinguishes two categories: highly sensitive and non -sensitive people. However, a number of recent studies suggest that sensitivity in the population is distributed similarly to body size: there are all possible intermediate stages. The distribution corresponds to a bell curve: most people are somewhere in the middle. In this case, the statistics speak of a "Gaussian normal distribution", named after the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß. As a result, the majority of people have a medium height or sensitivity, and the further you move from the middle to the extremes, the less often the forms occur. A high sensitivity therefore describes this one end of a dimensional - not categorical - personality feature. As a result, the question does not arise whether you are highly sensitive or not, but where you can classify yourself on this continuum.
However, if you are to assess your own sensitivity yourself, there is a risk of the Barnum effect, which often occurs when reading horoscopes: you think you recognize yourself in the general descriptions and can easily associate them with your own experiences. So if you read an article about high sensitivity, you may be tempted to consider yourself highly sensitive. But is this really true? How to measure high sensitivity?
Using interviews with highly sensitive people, Elaine Aron has developed a scale that "Highly Sensitive Person Scale" (HSPS). This is a catalog of 27 questions that the person concerned answers itself as usual in most personality tests. The scale was validated in numerous languages with a total of more than 15,000 participants, so it was scientifically checked whether it actually measures what it should measure.
A French study with more than 800 subjects found three facets of high sensitivity in data analyses: a low perception threshold, the tendency to feel overwhelmed by stimuli, and aesthetic sensitivity, i.e. the tendency to be strongly touched by beauty. The three areas are related: for example, if someone has a low threshold of perception, he is also more inclined to overexcitation and to aesthetic sensitivity. However, this is not always the case; there can be various combinations of manifestations. The overall score says something about the average degree of sensitivity.
After numerous studies, Elaine Aron came to the conclusion that about 20 percent of the population falls into the "highly sensitive" category. According to her, there is actually a clear difference between the majority with medium sensitivity and people who have significantly higher values. The crucial question is, however, where the threshold is used for high sensitivity. This depends on which degree of sensitivity uses discomfort, for example in a loud or overcrowded restaurant or with a bad working atmosphere at work.
What high sensitivity means in everyday life
Highly sensitive can be easily unsettled, for example, by pressure to perform or a rigid leadership style. On the other hand, they have emotional sensitivity that can prove to be strength in a good climate. Both also apply to school. In highly sensitive children, pressure to perform, competition, grades and sanctions have even more negative than with peers. If the school takes this into account, this can be an advantage for all children.
The disadvantages of highly sensitive also include the fact that they sometimes reap skepticism or ridicule. For example, you have to sound like you are hypersensitive or thin-skinned, and therefore sometimes doubt your mental state yourself. Not without reason, because high sensitivity can be accompanied by psychological problems. It is important for those affected and their environment to clarify with specialists whether there is actually a mental disorder behind any problems.
The degree of sensitivity depends on both the current physical and psychological constitution as well as experiences. This also applies to other dimensions of the personality, including the emotional unstable, some of which overlaps with high sensitivity. It is one of the five major personality dimensions, the "Big Five", and encompasses sensitivity to adversities paired with the tendency to negative emotions. Even during an acute depressive episode, those affected are more mentally unstable and tend to be increasingly negative emotions. Nevertheless, high sensitivity can be clearly distinguished from both. Depression is limited in time and, like emotional instability, affects only that of the negative emotions. High sensitivity, on the other hand, is expressed in the entire sensory and emotional and, unlike a depressive episode, is a stable property. But if high sensitivity is not a disturbance, how can the psychological problems be explained, from which many highly sensitive suffer?
First of all, high sensitivity is not to be equated with emotional difficulties. There are highly sensitive people who have pronounced emotional competencies. And they also do not have a monopoly on emotional problems: these experiences are part of life, regardless of the degree of sensitivity. But statistically speaking, highly sensitive people actually suffer from mental disorders more often than the average, for example from burnout and anxiety disorders. A team led by psychologist Corina Greven from Radboud University in the Netherlands, including Elaine Aron, has found that the questions in HSPS are mainly aimed at the negative consequences of increased sensitivity, which could partly explain the links with mental health problems.
The metaphor of orchids, tulip and dandelion
High sensitivity presents its wearer with great challenges, but also holds many resources. The theory of "differential sensitivity" put forward by Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess illustrates this. The idea: being highly sensitive is a disadvantage in a difficult environment, but an advantage in a good environment, especially in childhood. For this reason, highly sensitive people are often called orchids. The orchid is a delicate and demanding plant that needs a certain amount of light and humidity – then it will flourish magnificently and blossom into extraordinary beauty. Similarly, under the right conditions, high sensitivity can form a fertile breeding ground for personal development.
The psychologist Francesca Lionetti and her colleagues from the University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy continued the metaphor. They defined three groups of people and assigned them to flower varieties that are more or less sensitive: in addition to the highly sensitive "orchids" the robust "dandelion" and the average sensitive "tulips". According to Lionetti, orchids include 30 percent of the population. The categories can help to make differences aware, but here they also reimburse the actual dimension with all their intermediate stages (see "Children can be sensitive and robust at the same time").
The susceptibility to positive events, called "vantage sensitivity", is a still young field of research. The basic idea: there are not only people who are sensitive to negative experiences, but also those who are more receptive to positive influences. For example, psychologist Michael Pluess and his colleague Ilona Boniwell from Queen Mary University of London showed that highly sensitive girls benefited more from depression prevention programs than less sensitive peers. Pluess and his team offer a free German-language test for high sensitivity for adults and children online.
The advantages of high sensitivity can reveal themselves in different areas: at work, in interpersonal and in art. British psychologist David Bridges and his colleague Haline Schendan have examined the connection between sensitivity and creativity. For her study, she subjects almost 300 people to several tests. In the case of more creative among them, they found an increased openness to new experiences - a dimension of the "Big Five" - and increased sensitivity, especially in the perception of fine differences and in the ability to produce associations between things that are on the first Have little together.
High sensitivity is also good for positive surprises in professional life. In companies, it is often seen as a weakness, which is more susceptible to burnout or problematic leadership behavior. In practice, however, it often proves to be an advantage, for example when it comes to looking behind masks or recognizing a conflict. Coupled with the ability to recognize professional opportunities, high sensitivity even promotes willingness to found a company, as a team led by psychologist Rainer Harms from the University of Twente in the Netherlands showed in 2019.
Why it is good that not everyone is the same sensitive
Ultimately, you will always find at least one person in every social group who remains emotionally uninvolved when television reports on the victims of disasters, while others cannot stand the pictures. Such differences exist in all species, including Homo sapiens. But why?
In principle, differences are good that a species can adapt to different environmental conditions. This increases the chance that at least individual individuals will master new challenges. And so it was also an advantage for mankind that part of the group reacted very sensitive: if the predator rustled in the bushes, the highly sensitive snaps up and were able to warn the group in good time. Of course, it also needed less sensitive natures who dared to take up the fight with the animal.
In today's urban jungle, the rules don't even look that different. The ability to respond quickly to subtle signals is still an advantage on many occasions. If an employee notices that the supervisor's words and non-verbal signals do not match, he will not trust him. Maybe he gets to hear from colleagues that he is just imagining it – until one day it turns out that he had the right feeling.
High sensitivity is not necessarily pleasant, but it can be an advantage, as can save uncomfortable feelings. Behavioral researchers know that an anxiety reaction helps to survive a large number of prey in an enemy environment. The challenge is to live with the negative sides of high sensitivity and use their advantages.
High sensitivity can transform life into an emotional roller coaster. What can you do about it? The goal is not to get rid of high sensitivity, but to understand it, accept and live with it. The psychologist Moïra Mikolajczak from the Université Catholique de Louvain distinguishes five emotional skills that contribute to this.
Clobert, N., Brasseur, S.: Comment Gérer Son Hofersensité. Cerveau & Psycho 141, 2022
This text was originally published under the title "Vous avez dit sensible?" in the French magazine "Cerveau&Psycho".
