Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire

Author:Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire [Kaufman, Scott Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-29T07:00:00+00:00

Are You a Highly Sensitive Person?

So what exactly does it mean to be a highly sensitive person, and how do you know if you are one?

In the 1990s, Aron became curious what it really means when people are colloquially described as “sensitive.” Along with her husband, Arthur, also a psychologist, she conducted interviews with people who self-identified as “highly sensitive.” The Arons put up advertisements looking for people who were “introverted” or easily overwhelmed by things like noisy places or evocative or shocking entertainment, selecting an equal number of men and women across a wide range of ages and occupations. They then interviewed each person for three to four hours on a range of personal topics, from their childhood and personal history to current attitudes and life problems.

Many respondents expressed a connection to the arts and nature as well as an unusual sympathy for the helpless (animals, “victims of injustice”). Many also expressed their spirituality (“seeing God in everything,” going on long meditation retreats) as playing an important role in their lives. The Arons were surprised to see quite a few extraverts in their sample, considering that their advertisement specifically called for introverts.

Based on these interviews, they created a sixty-item questionnaire that included items that went far beyond simply being overwhelmed by stimulation. The questions ranged from having a rich and complex inner life to intensely falling in love; to having vivid dreams; to being deeply moved by the arts and music; to being startled easily; to being heavily affected by changes in one’s life; to being especially sensitive to pain, hunger, and caffeine. The final version of their scale, known as the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), contains twenty-seven items, which were tested on a group of undergraduate psychology students as well as on a random sample of participants.

To the Arons’ surprise—considering the broad range of elements—all of the items tended to clump together. In other words, those who scored high on one item tended to score high on all the other items, and those who scored low on one item tended to also score low on the others. It’s also noteworthy that although their final twenty-seven-item scale refers more frequently to negative emotions, the items on their larger original scale that had to do with positive emotions (“When you are feeling happy, is the feeling sometimes really strong?”) were still positively correlated with the negative-affect items. This is in line with the idea that sensitivity is associated with a wider range of emotional processing—both positive and negative.

Although the total score on the HSP Scale was associated with neuroticism, being highly sensitive appeared to be a larger personality trait than neuroticism alone. Even after taking neuroticism and negative affect into account, the scale still positively correlated with items such as “feeling love intensely” and “sometimes experiencing intense feelings of happiness.” And, it’s interesting to note, highly sensitive people were not all introverts. This makes sense, considering that there are plenty of highly sensitive introverts and extraverts. Indeed, as the metal

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