People Differ in their Sensitivity to the Environment: An Integrated Theory and Empirical Evidence

People differ in their response to similar experiences with some being generally more and some less sensitive. Several theories have been developed over the years to describe such differences in sensitivity and a growing number of studies in humans and other species provide empirical evidence that some individuals are indeed more affected than others by environmental influences as a function of various sensitivity markers. These include temperament traits in children as well as a number of biological factors such as physiological reactivity and genes. In this paper, we present an integrated theoretical perspective on Environmental Sensitivity and provide new empirical evidence that sensitivity, measured with a short questionnaire for adults, predicts differences in the response to negative as well as positive experiences. Results across four individual studies (total N = 1,140) suggest that individual differences in sensitivity to the environment can be reliably and easily assessed with a short self-report measure (HSP-12), confirmed and validated by two empirical studies according to which the scale predicts heightened reactivity to both negative and positive experiences. Furthermore, our findings show that sensitivity reflects a continuous spectrum from low to high along which people fall into three distinct sensitivity groups (low, medium, and high), and that sensitivity is associated with a specific personality profile characterised by both high neuroticism and high openness to experiences. We conclude that empirical findings confirm the theoretical proposition that people differ in their sensitivity to environmental influences and propose a number of future directions to advance research on environmental sensitivity.