Poster #53 - The Existence and Prevalence of different Types of Environmental Sensitivity

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

Background: Environmental Sensitivity refers to the ability to register and process external stimuli (Pluess, 2015). This ability enables an organism to perceive, evaluate, and respond to various environmental conditions and, hence, is critical for the adaptation to both adverse and beneficial aspects of the developmental context. A growing number of empirical studies have shown that people differ in their general environmental sensitivity. However, what hasn’t been taken into consideration yet is whether people differ not only in the degree of sensitivity but also regarding what they are sensitive to. More specifically, some individuals may be especially susceptible to adversity, some to positive experiences, some to both, and some to neither. Supported by theory ( Pluess, 2015) and empirical studies (Assary, Zavos, Krapohl, Keers, & Pluess, 2020), the current study aimed at developing a new statistical approach to categorize individuals based on a new sensitivity measure into different sensitivity types and then describe the prevalence of the different sensitivity types.
Participants: 1,000 adults (56.5% female) aged 27-54 years (M = 38.09, SD = 5.90) from the UK and USA, recruited online through Prolific, were included in the current online study.
Measures: Environmental sensitivity was measured with the Highly Sensitive Person scale Revised (HSP-R). The scale has six dimensions including negative and positive aspects of sensitivity. In addition, the IPIP Big-Five factor model (Goldberg, 2001) was applied to further investigate differences between the sensitivity types.
Methods: In a first step, we categorized individuals into a low sensitivity (bottom 30% of the total scale) and medium-to-high sensitivity (top 70% of the total scale) based on their scores on the newly developed HSP-R. Secondly, medians of two subscales of the HSP-R were used as cut-offs for negative and positive aspects of sensitivity in order to categorize individuals into four theoretical sensitivity types: high sensitivity (top 50% of vantage sensitivity and top 50% of vigilant sensitivity subscales), vantage sensitivity (top 50% of vantage sensitivity and bottom 50% of vigilant sensitivity subscales), vigilant sensitivity (top 50% of vigilant and bottom 50% of vantage sensitivity subscales) and medium sensitivity (bottom 50% of vigilant sensitivity and bottom 50% of vantage sensitivity subscales).
Results: Applying this approach, 15.8% of the sample fall into the highly sensitive category, 16.9% into the vantage sensitive type, 13.5% into the vigilant sensitive type, and 23.4% into the medium sensitive type. We also found significant differences between sensitivity types with respect to the Big-Five personality traits (Wilks’ λ = 0.53, F (20, 3265) = 34.65, p < .001, partial η2 = 0.15). Compared to the vigilant type, individuals reflecting the vantage sensitivity type reported higher scores on Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness, and lower scores on Neuroticism. Highly sensitive individuals, in comparison to low sensitive ones, showed higher scores on the all the five traits.
Conclusion: Results confirm the existence of different sensitivity types and qualitative differences between them. More research is needed to explore different types of sensitivity further.

Authors

• Yuanyuan Huang, queen mary university of london
  Presenting Author

• Michael Pluess, Queen Mary University of London