• About Dr. Elaine Aron
  • Resources
    • For HSPs
    • For Parents of HSCs
    • International Websites
    • HSP-Knowledgeable Therapists, Coaches and Medical Professionals
      • Seeking an HSP-knowledgeable Therapist?
      • For HSP-Knowledgeable Professionals
    • Coaches and Other Professionals
      • Certified Coaches
      • Medical Professionals
      • How to Be Listed as an HSP-Knowledgeable Professional
    • Just for Highly Sensitive Therapists (and Coaches)
  • For Interviews, Speakers
  • FAQs
  • Blog
  • How to Reach Us
  • The Foundation

The Highly Sensitive Person

  • Home
  • Books
    • The Highly Sensitive Person
    • The Highly Sensitive Parent
    • The Highly Sensitive Person’s Workbook
    • The Highly Sensitive Person in Love
    • The Highly Sensitive Child
    • Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Person
    • The Undervalued Self
  • Self-Tests
    • Are You Highly Sensitive?
    • Is Your Child Highly Sensitive?
    • High Sensation Seeking Test
  • Comfort Zone
    • Blog
    • Email Newsletters 2004-2014
  • HSP Events
  • Store
    • Bookstore
    • Audio
    • DVDs
    • Therapist List Test Materials
    • Shipping Info
  • If You Need Help
    • Therapists
    • Coaches
    • Medical Professionals
    • How to be listed as an HSP-knowledgeable professional
  • Research
    • Measurement Scales for Researchers
    • Summaries of Research – Easy Reads
    • Sensory Processing Sensitivity: The State of the Model (in Powerpoint format)
    • Research Articles by Elaine and Her Collaborators
    • Articles by Others That Are Especially Relevant
    • Researcher Contact
  • Videos & Podcasts

Is Your Child Highly Sensitive?

Instructions: Please answer each question as best as you can. Check answer if it is true or at least moderately true of your child, or was for a substantial time in the past. Leave unchecked if it has not been very true of your child, or was never at all true.

My child:

  • Hidden

Scoring:

If you answered true to 13 or more of the questions, your child is probably highly sensitive. But no psychological test is so accurate that you should base how you treat your child on it.

If only one or two questions are true of your child, but they are extremely true, you might also be justified in calling your child highly sensitive.

The contents of this website and the self-tests it contains are not meant to diagnose or exclude the diagnosis of any condition.  See more information on this subject in our FAQs.

Copyright © 2002 Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. — All rights reserved.

This is copyrighted material and may not be copied and used without permission. For permission, please email.

If you wish to use this questionnaire for psychological research, this questionnaire for parents is only published in The Highly Sensitive Child.  It was developed following a similar process that we used in the initial stages of developing the original HSP Scale:  interviews, initial questions, trying them out on a larger sample, and then systematically selecting a subset based on those data.

In this case, we conducted interviews with 40 parents, from which we wrote about 60 questions.  These 60 were given to about 100 parents contacted on playgrounds or door. Based on their results, we reduced it to what is here.

Unlike the adult scale, however, we tried to balance the more positive and negative items (to avoid the problems explained in Tips for SPS Researchers).  The alpha was .73.  We did not do further checks of validity and reliability, and hence did not publish an article about it.  There are researchers currently using it, and we will hopefully learn from them more about its qualities.

In the meantime, feel free to use it (with a 1-7 scale) and let us know the results.  For now, you could reference the book and this note on this website.  Do read the Tips for SPS Researchers.  Also, read there about a version of the adult scale written for school-age children.

Recent Blog Posts

  • Last of the 2022 Research
  • Research from 2022 on High Sensitivity
  • Research: High Sensitivity Wrongly Identified with Narcissism, Plus Studies on Parenting Applied to Managing and Caregiving
  • More HSP Research

Posts by Category

Search

Announcing our newest book
The Highly Sensitive Parent

HSP Parent

New 25th Anniversary Edition
The Highly Sensitive Person

HSP 25th Anniversary Edition

Announcing the release of our documentary Sensitive Lovers: A Deeper Look into their Relationships

In this documentary, Art Aron (well-known love researcher) and Elaine Aron provide the science and advice behind the film Sensitive and in Love. Learn more about Sensitive Lovers here.

Sensitive and In Love

A feature film, focuses on what perhaps matters most: how high sensitivity affects your relationships with loved ones. Learn more and purchase the Sensitive and In Love here.

Sensitive: The Untold Story

Rent or purchase Sensitive: The Untold Story here.

Click here to learn about the Foundation for The Study of Highly Sensitive People and how you can contribute.

Subscribe

Sign up for The Comfort Zone
for updates and announcements about events, book releases, blog posts and other news of interest to the HSP community. We will not share your information with anyone else.

CLICK HERE to join our mailing list.

Highlights

  • Info for Researchers
  • Find an HSP-knowledgeable Therapist

The Original Book

The Highly Sensitive Person book cover

A general introduction and covers every aspect of an HSP's life. Worldwide bestseller. Translated into 32 languages. With an Author's Note summarizing the latest research.

More Books by Elaine Aron...

Connect with Us

For questions, problems, or feedback, go here and choose the email address that fits your needs.

Copyright © 2023 Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. — All rights reserved.