A highly sensitive person (HSP) is a person having the innate trait of high psychological sensitivity (or innate sensitiveness as Carl Jung originally coined it). According to Elaine N. Aron and colleagues as well as other researchers, highly sensitive people, who comprise about a fifth of the population, may process sensory data much more deeply and thoroughly due to a biological difference in their nervous systems.
This is a specific trait with key consequences that in the past has often been confused with innate shyness, social anxiety problems, inhibitedness, or even social phobia and innate fearfulness, introversion, and so on. The existence of the trait of innate sensitivity was demonstrated using a test that was shown to have both internal and external validity. Although the term is primarily used to describe humans, the trait is present in nearly all higher animals.
Read more about Highly Sensitive Person: Usage, Epistemological Considerations, Research, Attributes and Characteristics, Measures, Contrast With Dabrowski's Over-excitability, Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words highly, sensitive and/or person:
“The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The hand I burned and whose skin is shriveled like that of a mummy’s is less sensitive than the other to cold or heat. My soul is the same; it passed through fire.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as “not black enough.” ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)