To explain again, since publishing my latest book, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens: An Objective Look at Meditation Methods and Enlightenment, I divide my blog posts into two parts–Part I is a brief review of a selection of recent research, and Part II is in keeping with the tone of the new book, something more “spiritual.” For that, scroll down in this post to Part II.
Part I. Interesting Recent Research
When I wrote my last summary of the recent research, in June, I did not have many good articles to choose from. Now, in August, there are fourteen I could write about. However, as the research multiplies, it reaches into areas of interest only to specific groups of you (parents of school age children, nurses, speech therapists, etc.), so I will put these studies at the end, and the reviews are briefer. That way I could focus on those studies most having to do with all HSPs.
Xiao, L., Deroost, N., Ma, N., & Baetens, K. (2026). The impact of sensory processing sensitivity on subtle dynamic facial expression recognition and metacognitive awareness. Psychological Research, 90(5), 152.
This study looked at sensory processing sensitivity (SPS, the term for the trait possessed by HSPs) in relation to subtle “dynamic” facial expression recognition—recognizing happy, fearful, angry, and neutral expressions when one sees in a video only the initial phase of the emotional unfolding. The participants were 125 college students, mostly women. Results showed that overall, regardless of SPS score, happiness was recognized most accurately, followed by fear and anger. Higher SPS predicted greater accuracy in recognizing all three emotional categories, suggesting enhanced sensitivity to both positive (happy) and negative (fearful, angry) affective cues. Additionally, all participants exhibited an overconfidence bias about the accuracy of their observations of fearful expressions, but this was much less for those high in SPS. All of this was still true after testing for the effects of a measure of Neuroticism, suggesting that refined emotional perception is a distinct feature of SPS, underpinning our greater empathy and prosocial behavior, while also contributing to our susceptibility to social and emotional overload.
Bottom Line: Yes, it is true—we do notice others’ emotions more.
I also reported on a study by this same first author, Xiao, last year: Xiao, L., Baetens, K., & Deroost, N. (2025). Adaptation in attentional cautiousness among highly sensitive persons: Evidence from spatial cueing paradigm. Personality and Individual Differences, 237, 113042.
In this study, participants had to choose the right answer, and first were given a cue that might or might not indicate the correct answer. The likelihood of it being a correct cue varied from 50% to 100%. HSPs were slower than others on all tasks, but when the correctness of the cues was increased to 100%, we adapted and speeded up our making use of the cues and answering.
Xiao has told me these two studies plus two more constitute her doctoral dissertation on SPS and perceptual/attentional processing at the Vrije (“Free,” meaning independent of church or government) University in Brussels. The two others are more difficult to explain so I am not going into the details.
One is Xiao, L., Baetens, K., & Deroost, N. (2024). Higher sensory processing sensitivity: increased cautiousness in attentional processing in conflict contexts. Cognition and Emotion, 38(4), 463-479. The researchers found that higher SPS was associated with increased attentional cautiousness in high-conflict contexts.
The other was Xiao, L., Baetens, K., & Deroost, N. (2025). Visual perception and metacognition in highly sensitive individuals: Insights from an orientation discrimination task. Current Psychology, 44(16), 14097-14109. In this study they found that SPS was not linked to a lower perceptual threshold during a task of identifying differences in stimuli. Rather, HSPs were more cautious about deciding the right answer when uncertain of it. Further, after taking this cautious approach, those high in SPS were less aware than others of the mistakes they had made.
Lin, B. L., Chiu, C. C., Huang, C. M., Lu, H., & Cheng, C. H. (2026). Altered theta-band sensory gating in individuals with high sensory processing sensitivity (SPS). Brain Research, 150443.
Here is another article that applies to all HSPs. It involves sensory gating (SG), an inhibitory process in the brain that suppresses redundant or irrelevant sensory inputs, so naturally it seemed worth looking at how HSPs might differ from others in their SG. Participants were those with the top and bottom 10 % of scores on the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) Scale. The top 10% also had to be “homozygous” for the serotonin allele (two shorts in their genotype rather than one short one long or two long, because the short serotonin allele seems to be related to SPS, although not clearly). So 26 high on SPS and 25 low on it completed a paired-stimulus auditory SG (again, sensory gating) paradigm. That is, they sat passively watching a neutral video while they heard a tone, then a second tone, and more pairs like that. The question was, how did the participants’ brains deal with these irrelevant stimuli?
The usual way of studying SG in this type of study is to look at the event-related potentials (tiny voltage changes in the brain, or ERPs), which happen at the time of the tones, but this study also looked at what happened over time by observing larger changes in the frequencies of “brain waves.” The first type of analysis of how the brain handled these stimuli showed no difference between HSPs and non-HSPs, but the brain wave analysis did show a difference, in the theta band of electroencephalography frequencies. To the authors this means that SPS is not characterized by uniformly weaker sensory inhibition (that is, we do not have a general problem with inhibiting irrelevant noise), but rather we are more dynamic in our response, altering our SG according to how the task unfolds, repeating or not. These findings are more consistent with the “deep processing” framework, which suggests that HSPs engage in more elaborate processing of environmental information. The authors conclude that theta-band SG may be a new way to identify SPS in individuals.
Bottom Line: We are not simply unable to protect ourselves from over stimulation (which would make SPS more like a disorder), but rather to some degree our brain can adapt and modulate what comes in.
Bueno, J., Sumner, P., & Bueno, B. (2026). Associations between stress and sensory processing sensitivity as risk factors for nightmares. International Journal of Dream Research Volume XX, No. X (2026)
There have already been studies finding HSPs tend to have more intense, vivid dreams and/or nightmares. (You can use Google Scholar to find these studies.) Nightmares are also common signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study sought to understand the relation among the three—PTSD symptoms, nightmares, and SPS. The authors gave their measures of these three variables to 104 participants recruited from special groups on Reddit, Facebook, and other social media sites, as well as group forums for PTSD populations. As expected, the authors found that PTSD symptoms were correlated with having more distressing and intense nightmares. PTSD symptoms (this is not simply a measure of having PTSD) and SPS were also correlated, or statistically associated. (This does not mean that one caused the other and certainly not that they are the same thing.) Finally, as was expected (or should have been, given earlier studies), HSPs were more likely than others to have intense dreams and nightmares even if they did not have many PTSD symptoms.
The authors also looked at the four aspects of SPS known as DOES: depth of processing, overstimulation, emotional reactivity and sensing the subtle. They were surprised that the strongest predictors of nightmares in HSPs were depth of processing and overstimulation, rather than the expected emotional reactivity. They conclude that sensory processing patterns could be a key factor in understanding the etiology of nightmares in trauma-related disorders.
Bottom Line: Previous research has found that HSPs have more vivid dreams. This study found that this is especially so if they have experienced stress lately, and when they score higher on a measure of PTSD, their dreams may be more like nightmares. Our depth of processing, the core aspect of our trait, appears to be behind this relationship.
Cheng, Y. C., & Su, C. H. (2026). When Digital Encouragement Becomes Digital Overload: A Qualitative Analysis of Self-Identified Highly Sensitive Users’ Accounts of Wearable Health Technologies on Reddit. Health Communication, 1-10.
This is an example of how research on SPS is springing up in so many domains of life. If it applies to you, I hope it will make you smile. It is a qualitative analysis of discussion threads on Reddit over the past five years on the subject of wearable health technologies and mobile health (mHealth) applications. These are widely promoted as tools for self-management, motivation, and behavior change, and many people love them. Can’t live without them. Gotta count those steps.
But it seems that some, especially HSPs, find all the alerts, activity rings, streaks indicating days of accomplishment and so forth can be problematic. The study analyzed 507 visible textual items using “reflexive thematic analysis informed by critical health communication and digital sociology.” Three themes were identified, among the HSPs especially: (1) not liking the sensory disruption of alerts, alarms, notifications, and tactile prompts; (2) the pressure caused by measurements of performance, the quantified self-evaluation associated with activity rings, streaks, and daily goals; and (3) that HSPs set boundaries on all this through selective disengagement and technological pruning, seeing these as forms of digital self-care. The authors hoped to contribute to health communication research by showing how communication design features shape emotional responses and adaptive practices, and by arguing for more sensory-inclusive, flexible approaches to digital health design.
Bottom Line: You are not alone if you find all these personalized mobile health messages like “great workout” or “almost there” not very helpful. (I personally still do not count my steps. I try to listen to what my body wants—keep going today or stop.)
Now we turn to the shorter reviews I promised of the many studies focused on specific issues or populations of HSPs.
Lv, J., Wang, L., Lu, M., Zhao, Y., Dong, J., Zhang, L., … & Lin, P. (2026). Profiles of environmental sensitivity among nursing students on clinical placement and their structural associations with failure mindsets: a latent profile and network analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1865123.
This study looked at nursing students and measured their high sensitivity and their “failure mindsets” (whether or not they learned from a failure, a positive mindset, or a failure set them up to fear more failure and do worse, a negative mindset). Those high in SPS tended to have a negative failure mindset. The authors point out that nursing is a very high pressure learning environment, so how students are treated when they fail will have a strong impact on students, especially those high on SPS.
Bordarie, J., & Mourtialon, C. (2026). Effects of high sensory processing sensitivity and coping strategies on compassion fatigue among speech-language therapists. Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 41(2), 578-598.
The interesting aspect of this study is the way the authors made use of a fourth factor within the old HSP Scale. The study continued the authors’ interest in the complex role of SPS in the context of speech-language therapists (Bordarie & Mourtialon, 2023) as an example of one of the professions in which burnout and “compassion fatigue” has been well studied. But they emphasize the adaptive nature of the trait, especially as seen in the Aesthetic Sensitivity factor. (I have talked about this factor in the past, as part of the three factors found within the old HSP Scale—it is simply the factor created by all the positively worded items. Aesthetics has little to do with it. Read about it in the past blog here. )
But these authors uncovered a fourth factor (factor analysis can be used in this way), which they call “Controlled Harm Avoidance,” used in the French HSP Scale (See Bordarie, J., Aguerre, C., & Bolteau, L.2022. Validation and study of psychometric properties of a French version of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (HSPS-FR). European Review of Applied Psychology; but this extra factor was first described in Meyer, B., Ajchenbrenner, M., & Bowles, D. P.. Sensory sensitivity, attachment experiences, and rejection responses among adults with borderline and avoidant features. Journal of Personality Disorders. Have to give credit where credit is due!)
This fourth factor consists of three items from the old HSP Scale: Are you conscientious? Do you try hard to avoid making mistakes or forgetting things? Do you make it a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations? They view this fourth factor as a positive, protective aspect of the trait, and this was true in their study. Those high on this factor were coping better. But my point in telling you all this is that I like how they found ways to make that old measure more positive.
Connery, T., Doyle, M., Murphy, M., & Setti, A. (2026). Psychological factors associated with sensory processing sensitivity in professional caregivers: A systematic review. Current Psychology, 45(17), 1417.
Having now looked at another nursing study plus one of HS speech therapists, maybe we can finish up this topic for a while. (Although, from the comments posted since the last blog, with all the nursing studies, I know the nurses really appreciated seeing this research.) There is a new systematic review summarizing the research on professional caregivers (nurses, etc.) and SPS. There were many findings on stress, burnout, etcetera, but also the finding that social support reduced compassion fatigue by reducing perceived stress. The reviewers conclude that areas of SPS-related strengths are under-investigated, with a need for future research in this area to support more sensitive caregivers to thrive at work.
Laval, M. D. F., Arellano, J. M., & Amador, M. S. (2026). Sensory processing sensitivity as a modulator of cognitive performance in adults with and without depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 122281.
Being depressed tends to be associated with poorer performance on IQ tests, but the authors wondered how SPS might affect this. They found that in this study there was no general relationship between IQ and depression, but looking only at the positive factors in their measure of SPS, HSPs high on these factors and low on depression scores had higher IQ scores than others, but HSPs having these positive factors and high levels of depression scored lower on IQ than others. This is a correlational study (not showing causation) that needs more research before we can draw conclusions. In particular, since the positive factor always involves depth of processing, and depth of processing has a negative twin, rumination, and rumination is a strong correlate with depression, yes there is more to research here.
Malin, Y., Goueta, N., & Scharf, M. (2026). Rethinking sensory processing sensitivity: A multidimensional, configurational perspective on adolescent thriving and vulnerability. Current Psychology, 45(14), 1230.
This study looked at SPS (using the old HSP Scale) and various measures such as PTSD, family functioning, and “thriving” to get a better understanding of adolescence. The study was done in Israel during a period of armed conflict. Low sensitive profiles showed better adjustment, while highly sensitive profiles simultaneously conferred increased emotional vulnerability and heightened prosocial tendencies.
Ferrer-Cascales, R., Costa-López, B., Ruiz-Robledillo, N., Delvecchio, E., & Albaladejo-Blázquez, N. (2026). Academic stress as a mediator in the association between sensory processing sensitivity and mental health in university students. Discover Psychology.
The title of this article says it all. Specifically, exam related stress and a negative social environment tended to make HSPs more anxious, and poor teaching methods contributed more to any depression they were feeling.
Rioux, C., Childers-Rockey, Z. A., Hill, A., Freeman, C. L., Chiramel, J., Jamison, W. J., … & Castellanos-Ryan, N. (2026). Associations of sensory processing sensitivity with cannabis motives and consumption in young adults. Addictive Behaviors, 108833.
The study found that SPS was not associated with cannabis use, but the old HSP Scale identified differing motives for use among HSPs.
Sebben, S., Zhang, J., Frizzo, G. B., Wade, M., & Browne, D. (2026). Children’s screen time and psychological well-being: The moderating role of environmental sensitivity. Brain and Environment, 100024.
Screen time and negative mental health was more often associated with highly sensitive children (the children in the study were ages 5 to 17), although this does not indicate causation. The question remains, are HSCs turning to screen time to deal with negative feelings they already have or are they developing negative feelings as a result of more screen time? More research is needed.
Renzi, A., Guglielmi, D., Nimbi, F. M., & Galli, F. (2025). Somatic symptoms and environmental sensitivity in preadolescents and adolescents: the mediating role of alexithymia-insights for wellbeing promotion. Current Psychology, 44(12), 12196-12208.
This study looked at the contribution of SPS to somatic complaints (headaches, stomach aches) in children aged 11 to 14, along with other factors such as home life and alexithymia, which is the ability to identify, understand, and describe one’s feelings. Somatic symptoms were associated with SPS, both directly and along with emotional dysregulation, insecure attachment, and gender.
Part II. Something “Spiritual”: Dividing the Big Picture into Three Can be Interesting and Helpful
As some of you may have noticed, over the years I love to write about the Big Picture. I find it is always helpful, especially for HSPs, to step back and take the larger view. It is calming and informative. “How will this seem a year from now?” “How would someone who doesn’t even know me view this?” “What are the actual odds of that happening?” “How would this look if viewed from another planet?” Sometimes the big picture is even enlightening. For example, in Part II of my last blog I wrote about “Who You Really Are.” That was a very big picture.
Suppose we took the Big Picture and cut it into three pieces. Two pieces also works: yin and yang, good and evil, physical and spiritual, me and others, etcetera. But using three pieces yields even more information about the contents of the Big Picture.
The Three Gunas. Huh?
From India we have the three gunas, a pretty good classification-of-everything system which you may have heard of. Or not. No, these are not female goons or gonads mispronounced. But even if you have heard of this threesome, I think it is nice to review them.
The three gunas are, roughly, freshness or creativity, action in the service of maintenance, and destruction. In Sanskrit the terms are sattva, rajas, and tamas, which I will use, as many of you may already know them as that. These forces, you might call them, are understood to be all over the universe and at every level of matter. Stars are born, live, and die. Everything alive, and even rocks, are born, live, and die. These qualities or tendencies are present in everything and everyone, never in isolation but in various proportions. As soon as something is formed it is in the process of maintaining and eventually breaking up.
In more detail, Sattva is the quality of creativity, building, balance, harmony, purity, universalizing (being or seeing the Big Picture), and luminousness. More specifically in a living being it is a positive attitude, creative thought (but not drivenness), serenity, being-ness, peacefulness, virtuousness, love and connection. Everything full of sattva is growing and becoming, like babies, budding flowers, new stars, new ideas.
Rajas is the quality of maintenance through activity, movement, dynamism, change. How is that maintenance? Nothing stays the same, but the activity represented by rajas keeps it from disappearing, descending into chaos, tamas. In a sense rajas ise neither good nor bad, or maybe both. In a person it is associated with self-centeredness, passion about what one is doing or feeling for someone or something, drivenness, creative action and simple action (such as exercising to maintain body strength, shopping for groceries so you can make meals).
Tamas is the quality of inertia, imbalance, disorder, chaos, violence, destruction, death, negativity, darkness, stagnation, impureness. In a living being it is ignorance, delusion, anxiety, negative attitude or mood, laziness, apathy, resistance to change, and carelessness, viciousness. Whether we like it or not, tamas is always there to some degree. Some things must be destroyed or inactive in order for other things to happen. Sometimes we get tired. Sometimes I get very tired. Grouchy. Ugh.
Sattva is obviously where we want to be. It is nicest. Kindest. Closest to enlightenment. But all three are always in us in some way and in everything.
The Three Doors in Buddhism
Buddhism has a similar threesome that is more personal. Buddha saw philosophizing about how things are generally to be a waste of time, since his only goal was nirvana or awakening, first for himself and when he got it, for all of us. So he kept his threesome human and relevant. They are mind, speech, and action, the three “doors” or primary channels through which all human actions and communication occur. They are how we accumulate wholesome or unwholesome results.
Mind (Citta) refers to thoughts, feelings, and intentions, both positive and negative. The mind is considered primary because the other two stem from something that has happened first in the mind. So it has a flavor like sattva.
Speech (Vāk) refers to speaking and also to writing. Verbal communication is its own category because words carry immense power to harm (e.g. through lying, harsh or mean words, or gossip) or to heal (e.g. through honesty, expressions of compassion or comfort, diplomacy, reconciliation). It gets things done with a moderate amount of effort. It feels to me more like rajas.
Body (Kāya) refers to physical actions and conduct–harmful acts like killing, stealing, or being lazy about helping out or taking care of your health as well as positive acts such physical kindness, acts of reverence, and proper bodily self-care, including exercise and posture. I guess because we are always wearing out, getting older, and ultimately dying, it feels closer to tamas.
Breaking Up the Big Picture in Order to See More
Mind, speech, and body each express some major aspect of the Big Picture, the human one, but let’s stick to the three gunas for now, because they are more inclusive. How can breaking up the whole of anything be helpful? It provides information, insight, and maybe the possibility for more effective action.
For example, think of how your day is going? When were you feeling good, positive, hopeful, helpful, or having creative ideas or loving thoughts? How much time have you had to spend just maintaining your health, income, and so forth? And what happened that was destructive? Maybe your car broke down, something under your sink sprung a leak, someone who should have been helpful or at least pleasant was rude, or you got a worrisome medical report.
So where are you now? Stuck in tamas with not much energy for dealing with the day’s events? Full of rajas, taking action to get the car working, a plumber in, a medical appointment? And through all this, what has been your mood? Feeling hopeless? Annoyed? “Why does this always happen just when…” Or are you meeting the day with rajas. Fully engaged in coping? Or maybe sattva is still there—you know you have or will take care of things, but you just are not bothered by it all?
You do have some control over your day—mind is primary. Consider what you might do to bring back some balance or even increase the sattva? Common self-help advice fits here: Keep things in perspective, ask for help, be helpful to others to make yourself feel better, etcetera. You can see this sort of advice in terms of rebalancing the three gunas. But the point is, if you step back and get the Big Picture of the Big Three, you may gain a fresh perspective on your day.
Observing the World in Terms of the Three Gunas
You can use these three while watching the news, thinking about the world as it is at the moment, or just observing some place or situation nearer home. The idea for writing this came from my visiting friends who live in one of these continuing care retirement communities, where you start by living independently, but all the maintenance is taken care of, meals are provided if you want them, and then you can be taken care of with skilled nursing when you need it and of course when you are dying. Even before I arrived, I was thinking about the three gunas—maintenance, rajas, was obviously what the place was about, until tamas wins and you die. Not too inspiring. But what about sattva? I found plenty of it, in the kindness of the staff and of all the people towards each other (this one was founded by Baptists, so a spiritual foundation may have influenced that). Thinking of all three helped me look for the sattva and find a wealth of it.
The same weighing of the three elements could be used for looking at schools or camps for your kids or work environments for yourself. What predominates: sattva, rajas, or tamas? It is a very helpful heuristic.
What’s Spiritual About This?
I will let you think about these three. But I will also leave you with another perspective on them. In Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens I wrote about Krisha and Arjuna—Krishna was the charioteer for Arjuna, who had to begin a civil war with his first arrow, a war that he knew would lead to the deaths of many of his most beloved friends and relatives, who were fighting on both sides. In describing the origins of meditation, I talked about Krishna’s famous advice to Arjuna, “Established in Being, perform action.” Later Krishna talks about how to be established in Being: “Be without the three gunas.” Referring back to my last blog, another way to speak of “who you really are” is that you are beyond the three gunas. You are beyond them when you meditate and truly there when meditation alternated with daily activity makes you fully aware, permanently, of who you really are. Ponder that for a moment.
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