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1. 00:02 Those of you who regrettably listen to self-styled experts online have been
2. 00:08 exposed to the argument that empaths is just another name for what is known
3. 00:15 in clinical jargon as highly sensitive people or HSPs. In other words, empath
4. 00:23 equals HSP. But since this information is coming emanating from self-styled experts as usual, it is misinformation.
5. 00:35 No, empaths are not HSPs and HSPs are
6. 00:41 not empaths. And the main reason for this is that there’s no such thing as empaths.
7. 00:48 Okay. Shadim. But today we are going to del deep into sensitive people also
8. 00:56 known as highly sensitive persons HSPs. My name is Sanvatn. I’m the author of
9. 01:02 malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I’m also a professor of psychology. And today I’m going to
10. 01:08 review an article published recently entitled the relationship between
11. 01:14 environmental sensitivity and common mental health problems in adolescence and adults a systematic review and meta
12. 01:22 analysis. It was published in clinical psychological science not long ago. As I said let’s start with some basic facts. It is estimated that anywhere between
13. 01:34 1/5 and one/ird of the population are highly sensitive. They are highly
14. 01:40 sensitive persons HSPS. Now people who are less versed with
15. 01:46 clinical psychology and its vCitudes they would say that there’s no such
16. 01:52 thing as highly sensitive person. these are drama queens or they are thin skinned or they can’t take criticism or
17. 02:00 you know or maybe even they’re narcissists but it seems that HSPs highly sensitive persons is a clinical construct that has some validity these
18. 02:11 people may be wired differently as far as their brains go
19. 02:17 so this article that I’ve referred to earlier involved 12,000 people. It’s
20. 02:24 actually a metaanalysis put together previous studies and the experts who
21. 02:30 metaanalyzed these studies found that people persons with high sensitivity were more likely to experience mental health issues including anxiety and
22. 02:41 depression. In other words, if you’re highly sensitive, you’re more likely to be anxious or depressed than if you’re
23. 02:48 not sensitive like me. Now this is not as trivial as it sounds.
24. 02:57 It’s not as trivial because the dimension of sensitivity has been much neglected both in
25. 03:03 literature and in psychological testing let let alone in treatment. So it is a
26. 03:10 breakthrough uh article or breakthrough meta analysis because it places the
27. 03:16 dimension or the trait of of sensitivity firmly on the table.
28. 03:22 Tom Falinstein, a psychotherapist at Queen at Queen Mary University in London, um, co-authored the study and this is what he had to say. We found positive
29. 03:35 and moderate correlations between sensitivity and various mental health problems such as depression, anxiety,
30. 03:43 post-traumatic stress disorder, agorophobia, and avoidant personality disorder. Our findings, said
31. 03:50 Falconstein, our findings suggest that sensitivity should be considered more in
32. 03:56 clinical practice which could be used to improve diagnosis of conditions. In addition, our findings could help improve treatment for these individuals. Highly sensitive persons concludes the
33. 04:08 co-author are more likely to respond better to some psychological interventions than less sensitive
34. 04:14 individuals. Therefore, sensitivity should be considered when thinking about treatment plans for mental health
35. 04:21 conditions. But what what are we talking about? What is a highly sensitive person? The widely accepted definition
36. 04:29 is it is someone with an increased central nervous system sensitivity to
37. 04:35 physical, emotional and social stimuli. No empathy mentioned, hence no empaths.
38. 04:45 Empaths out. Okay. The term highly sensitive person was coined in the mid
39. 04:52 1990s by psychologist Elaine Aaron. A r o n and she published a book titled the
40. 04:59 highly sensitive person. Mind you, she was not the first to suggest this. Jung was actually the
41. 05:06 first. We’ll come to it a bit later. This part of the video is for layman and
42. 05:12 then I’m going to go deep diving into the clinical literature and that would be a part for clinicians. Anyhow, Aeron theorized that highly sensitive persons
43. 05:23 have a hyper evolved sense of danger. In other words, hypervigilance.
44. 05:29 And she thought she postulated that this is the result of inherited genes. In
45. 05:36 other words, she suggested in a roundabout way that sensitivity was a trait because we know that human traits are hereditary. And so she said it’s genes are involved
46. 05:49 and these people can read other human emotions to an extraordinary degree.
47. 05:55 They don’t experience these emotions, but they can read other people. This is very reminiscent actually of the
48. 06:02 narcissist and the psychopaths called empathy. Aaron did not say that there is any emotional response to this reading of other people’s emotions. In other
49. 06:13 words, Aaron did not involve empathy in the presentation of highly sensitive persons only the ability to decode and decipher and read other people. But this
50. 06:24 is also true of narcissists and psychopaths. Of course, Later research suggested that highly
51. 06:30 sensitive persons have probably higher levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and this contributes to a
52. 06:38 heightened responsiveness to stimuli. There were other studies and these studies cited childhood trauma, adverse
53. 06:46 childhood experiences as potential causes. This is the eternal battle zone, eternal conflict and debate between
54. 06:53 nature and nurture. And so in this new research, the article
55. 06:59 that I’m I would be analyzing this video, um the the scientists or the scholars
56. 07:06 amalgamated 33 studies involving as I said almost 13,000 people anywhere
57. 07:13 between um uh 12 years of age and you know 89 years of age. They found that
58. 07:20 highly sensitive persons were more likely to suffer depression and anxiety. But this was only part of the picture.
59. 07:28 They said that um sensitivity is significantly correlated with common mental health outcomes. And they paid attention to specific
60. 07:39 disorders. One of the one of the paragraphs in the article says it is also noticeable that
61. 07:46 we found moderate and positive correlations with agorophobia and avoidant personality disorder.
62. 07:53 It is noticeable. It is interesting because one explanation for the higher
63. 07:59 likelihood of highly sensitive persons experiencing anxiety may be what the
64. 08:06 authors called the depth of processing or their tendency to respond with over stimulation. depth of processing, says the article, might reflect a tendency to
65. 08:17 worry about future outcomes. Catastrophizing or could lead to imagining possible
66. 08:24 future scenarios in a given situation that could account for some anxiety. Again, they’re describing catastrophizing. Depression, on the other hand, might be more dependent on the environmental factors. What emerges from this study is
67. 08:37 that hypervigilance and catastrophizing which are common causes of anxiety and
68. 08:44 if anxiety persists common causes of depression they are associated with high
69. 08:50 sensitivity. Professor Michael Pluse, an expert in in developmental psychology at the
70. 08:56 University of Sari and Mary and Queen Mary University of London and one of the
71. 09:02 co-authors of a study added this. It is important to remember that highly sensitive people are also more
72. 09:09 responsive to positive experiences, not only negative ones, including psychological treatment. Our results
73. 09:16 provide further evidence that sensitive people are more affected by both negative and positive experiences and
74. 09:22 that the quality of their environment is particularly important for their well-being.
75. 09:29 It’s a limited study in in many ways. The average age of the people in the study was 25. There is a question as to the trajectory of the sensitivity trait
76. 09:41 throughout the lifespan. Are we more sensitive when we are young and much less sensitive, much more jaded when we
77. 09:49 are older? We don’t know the answer to this. And most of the participants were highly uh educated young women which by common stereotype are prone to be more
78. 10:02 sensitive than men or at least to display more sensitivity um than men. And so there was an over
79. 10:10 representation of of women. And even the authors admit that this makes it difficult to predict whether the
80. 10:16 correlations observed could apply to a more diverse population. Heightened sensitivity can also be the
81. 10:24 the consequence of mental health problems rather than the cause. In other words, it’s difficult to establish the arrow of causation. Which is the chicken
82. 10:35 and which is the egg? What has led to what? If you if you’re born highly sensitive, if your trait if your sensitivity trait is is very vulnerable,
83. 10:47 highly overstimulated, you may develop mental illness. On the other hand, perhaps you’re born with
84. 10:53 some kind of mental illness or you develop mental illness owing to life’s uh egregious circumstances and then you
85. 11:00 become sensitized. You become sensitive. We don’t know which leads to which on to
86. 11:06 be honest. Um so all the studies in this meta analysis
87. 11:15 uh relied on self-reporting. People reported their feelings.
88. 11:22 That is always a seriously bad idea. We can’t trust self-reporting.
89. 11:28 It’s nothing near a randomized trial. Um
90. 11:34 people are influenced by specific um personalities and by specific composition or constitution and in
91. 11:45 internal psychological processes and other traits. So for example, if you’re highly introspective,
92. 11:52 if you constantly engage in soulsearching, you may you may um develop sensitivity
93. 11:58 or if you’re people pleaser, attuned to the needs of other people all the time.
94. 12:04 If you’re codependent, there is a question here as to whether sensitivity is a primary trait which predisposes to certain behaviors and
95. 12:16 mental constitutions and mental illness or whether it is the outcome, a derivative trait, the outcome or whether even it’s triggered. In other words, it’s there. It’s dormant and triggered. We have no clue. We don’t know. We don’t know to answer these questions.
96. 12:33 The number of people seeking help for mental illness has risen by 40% since
97. 12:39 the pandemic. At any given moment in the United States alone, there are 4 million
98. 12:45 people in treatment for mental illnesses. And the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that almost one quarter of children I’m sorry that’s in England, not in United States, in
99. 12:57 England. And so the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that almost one quarter of children in
100. 13:04 England now have probable mental disorder up from 20% in the previous
101. 13:10 year. And so if we can assertain, if we can establish that environmental sensitivity is a
102. 13:22 personality trait, that it reflects individual differences in response to
103. 13:28 environmental influences and stimuli and cues. If we can establish this, then we
104. 13:34 will have stumb stumbled upon another dimension which predisposes either to
105. 13:40 mental health or to mental illness. Although the link between common personality traits and psychopathology
106. 13:48 is well established, the trait of sensitivity has been overlooked.
107. 13:54 Shockingly, if I may say, because you know mentally ill people strike casual
108. 14:01 observers and layman as highly sensitive or oversensitive. And yet this has been completely ignored in both clinical practice in scholarly literature.
109. 14:12 There is a robust association between um sensitivity and mental health
110. 14:19 and and this has been established actually in several studies. The relationship between big five
111. 14:27 personality traits and psychopathology is is uh now indisputable.
112. 14:34 We have con we have studies that demonstrate consistently conclusively and convincingly that higher levels of
113. 14:40 neuroticism are associated with poorer mental health outcomes including greater
114. 14:46 levels and incidence and of depression and anxiety and psychological distress.
115. 14:53 Um, another personality trait that is associated with increased risk of mental
116. 14:59 health issues is as I said sensitivity. The trait sensitivity also referred in the literature as sensory processing sensitivity SPS.
117. 15:14 Again, Aeron made major contributions to this. So the trait of sensitivity is a
118. 15:20 form of heightened degree of responsiveness to physical, emotional
119. 15:26 and social stimuli. It could be anything from bright lights, subtle changes in the environment, other people’s moods and there is deeper cognitive processing
120. 15:37 of such sensory stimulation. It’s as if the apparatus, the mental
121. 15:44 apparatus, the mental machinery is overwhelmed and there’s a need to cognitively
122. 15:50 process things in order to avoid a total meltdown or total collapse. Sensitivity is also associated with other established personality traits such as neuroticism, introversion, and openness
123. 16:03 to experiences. Although we should not confuse these sensitivity is not any of
124. 16:10 these things. I refer you to studies by Leoneti Plur and others.
125. 16:16 So we need to conceptualize sensitivity as a trait and this is nothing new. This
126. 16:22 is not Aeron’s work that that is actually Carl Jung’s work. The Swiss
127. 16:28 psychiatrist and psychoanalyst proposed as early as 1913 more than 115 120 110 years ago he proposed that there
128. 16:40 is something he called innate sensitiveness and this has become the focus of empirical research uh starting in the mid 1990s. The reason for this delay is that psychoanalysis in
129. 16:57 general has been disparaged and mocked and ridiculed and and became an outcast
130. 17:04 regrettably. One of the most stupid moves in in modern psychology. But okay, Jung pointed out that there is what he called innate sens sensitiveness
131. 17:15 in people and that some people have higher innate sensitiveness and others
132. 17:21 have lower innate sensitiveness. In this sense, it’s a spectrum that is very reminiscent of all other traits we know of including for example narcissism. It has been shown that individual differences in registering, processing
133. 17:37 and responding to environmental stimuli exist in many species, not only human beings. We have studies by Belki, Ellis, many others. And these differences must be
134. 17:50 neurobiological. it’s very unlikely that they emerge out of some kind of um early childhood
135. 17:58 conditioning or early childhood trauma or abuse. In this particular case, I’m a
136. 18:04 proponent of the hereditary genetic model. Um these differences uh in
137. 18:11 sensitivity are associated with genetic and prenatal and post-natal environmental factors and are driven by
138. 18:18 a more sensitive central nervous system. It’s not only Aaron that says this. This
139. 18:24 grievant says this. Wolf says this. There are at least three theoretical
140. 18:31 frameworks that have been since developed to try to to attempt to describe or capture individual
141. 18:38 differences in sensitivity. So the first model is known as differential susceptibility. It’s the model developed
142. 18:45 by Bilski and Lewis. The second model is biological sensitivity to context. developed by Boyce and Ellis and then there is the most famous model sensory
143. 18:56 processing sensitivity which is Aeron’s model. There are differences between these frameworks, but they all share the notion that individual differences in sensitivity exist for evolutionary
144. 19:08 reasons and that sensitive individuals are both more vulnerable to the negative effects of adversity, but they also benefit more from positive
145. 19:19 supportive experiences. They are overreactive to both positive and negative stimuli or
146. 19:27 inputs. And so there was an attempt to integrate these different sensitivity concepts
147. 19:34 into a single overarching meta framework. Plus attempted it in 2015 and
148. 19:40 he introduced the umbrella term environmental sensitivity es which has been adopted increasingly in recent years to describe sensitivity as a concept and as a trait.
149. 19:53 Sensitive people, people with sensitivity, heightened sensitivity, generally fall into three distinct
150. 19:59 groups along a sensitivity continuum. There are people with low sensitivity,
151. 20:05 that’s about one/ird of a population. People with medium sensitivity, which is majority of us, about 40% of the
152. 20:12 population, and highly sensitive people, 31% of a population that is work conducted by Leonetti.
153. 20:20 There was one twin study AERI in 2020 and there were several uh functional MRI
154. 20:27 studies at Civo, Aaron, Yagelovich and and others and all of them support the
155. 20:34 biological basis of the traits. They show that sensitivity is moderately heritable and marked by higher activation in brain regions that are involved in empathy, social processing
156. 20:46 and reflective thinking. Now this activation in these brain areas
157. 20:54 do not imply that these people are hypermpathic, hyper social,
158. 21:00 capable of a heightened level of thinking. That’s not what these models
159. 21:06 and theories and studies show there. That’s why highly sensitive people are not empaths, whatever that may mean. It simply shows that these regions in the
160. 21:18 brain react more powerfully to environmental stimuli than in normal
161. 21:24 people. The innate experience, the inner experience of highly sensitive persons,
162. 21:32 is not that of heightened empathy for example, but hyper reactivity
163. 21:40 to cues and stimuli and inputs including verbal inputs from other people. The
164. 21:46 reaction is not to some u internal landscape of of the other
165. 21:53 person but to what the other person is doing. Empathy is when you interact
166. 22:00 with the internal processes, the internal landscape, the mind, the
167. 22:07 feelings of another person. The interaction is imaginary. Of course, it’s constructed on a theory of mind. It
168. 22:14 emanates from a theory of mind. It’s a it’s a process of mentalization. But empathy is about what goes on in the
169. 22:20 mind of another person. Whereas highly sensitive persons, hypers sensitivity is
170. 22:28 about what other people do, what other people say
171. 22:34 and the reaction, the hypersensitive reaction is to these external
172. 22:40 observables. Similarly, when we say social processing, when we say that highly
173. 22:46 sensitive persons um are the social processing of highly sensitive person is enhanced, elevated, the brain regions in of highly
174. 22:58 sensitive persons which deal with social processing light up or fire up. It doesn’t mean that these people are more social or more sociable or react to social cues more than others. that what that’s not what it means. It means that when they find themselves in social
175. 23:15 situations, their brains overreact. Okay? It’s a very critical distinction.
176. 23:22 It’s not about the inside. It’s about the outside. It’s a reaction to the outside
177. 23:29 and it’s a reaction to surface phenomena. It’s a reaction to what what is observable by other people as well. It’s a reaction to what other people say, what other people do, how many
178. 23:40 people are in the room, whether it’s a social gathering and so on and so forth. According to Aaron, sensitivity is indicated by heightened sensory
179. 23:51 sensitivity. The emphasis is on sensor, sensory inputs, not on empathy, not on any psychological process. It’s simply a heightened reaction, hyper
180. 24:04 reactivity, over stimulation owing to sensory inputs that come from
181. 24:12 the environment. There’s a proness if you wish to hyper arousal.
182. 24:19 There’s an emotional reactivity. There’s a depth of processing. And all these can be measured.
183. 24:26 there’s um um there scales and and tests that we we can administer and they tell us where people where people are on the sensitivity scale and so initially in 1997 Aeron proposed that um
184. 24:45 sensitivity is a uni-dimensional thing but later studies found that there are multiple dimensions in sensitivity for example Smolfka identified a three factor structure
185. 24:58 involving the following. Number one, ease of excitation, which refers to being easily overwhelmed by internal or external stimuli. Very reminiscent of emotional
186. 25:09 dysregulation in borderline personality disorder. And so one of the typical questions in the in the scale is are you more than others affected by the moods of other people? Then second dimension, low
187. 25:22 sensory threshold, which refers to unpleasant sensory arousal from external
188. 25:28 stimuli. Do you become unpleasantly aroused when a lot is going on around you? And that is very reminiscent of
189. 25:34 autism. And C, aesthetic sensitivity, which refers to being susceptible to beauty
190. 25:40 and the arts. Are you deeply moved by the arts, music, films, and so on. You’re beginning to see that highly
191. 25:48 sensitive persons may be a hybrid or a mongrel construct.
192. 25:55 Actually, if we were to remove people with autism spectrum disorder, if we were to remove people with borderline personality disorder, nothing much will will be left. I’m proposing that highly
193. 26:08 sensitive persons is just another name for people with highly specific mental health problems and disorders such as
194. 26:15 borderline personality disorder, such as antisocial, such as autism spectrum
195. 26:21 disorder and such as narcissistic personality disorder. I think if you put all these disorders together, what you get is highly sensitive persons. Of course, there are highly sensitive persons who are not mentally ill. Highly sensitive persons without a personality
196. 26:37 disorder. There are such people. Their brains are built in a way constructed in
197. 26:43 a way that they overreact to any stimulus from the outside. In recent years, what is emerging is a bifactor structure
198. 26:54 which has been confirmed in in studies. there’s an overarching sensory uh
199. 27:00 sensitivity factor and there are three subscales that capture the multi-dimensionality that I mentioned
200. 27:07 before with Smlesca’s work. Over the last 25 years, there’s a growing number of studies and there is one systematic review uh Costa Lopez
201. 27:18 2021 and they’ve investigated the relationship between sensitivity
202. 27:24 and mental health in adolescence and adults. And these studies provided what
203. 27:31 I regard as incontrovertible evidence of a consistent association between high levels of sensitivity and a wide range
204. 27:38 of symptoms of psychopathology and psychological issues. Anxiety and depression. Baker and molding lease and other studies. Difficulties in emotional
205. 27:49 regulation. Brindle low levels of subjective happiness. Soboko Zalinski, not dead
206. 27:56 Zalinski. Lower levels of life satisfaction, both increased levels of stress, backer and
207. 28:03 molding, physical symptoms of ill health, Benham, burnout, golona and
208. 28:09 gala, greater dissatisfaction at work and a greater need for recovery. Anderson, Everest and others. They see
209. 28:18 that high sensitivity predisposes people to malfunction or to dysfunction. It
210. 28:24 reduces self-efficacy and affects functioning in a variety of
211. 28:30 areas of life. In this sense, um, high sensitivity
212. 28:38 may not only be a trait, but a predisposing psychoggenic factor, a predisposing, a
213. 28:49 factor predisposing for psychopathology, pathogenic factor in effect.
214. 28:57 Now there are several explanations offered about the underlying mechanisms uh that drive this detected association
215. 29:04 between sensitivity and mental health issues. So Benham and Brindle suggested that individuals with high levels of
216. 29:11 sensitivity suffer from poor mental health uh than individuals low in sensitivity because of their tendency to
217. 29:17 feel more easily overstimulated and maybe overwhelmed by internal and external stimuli.
218. 29:24 More specifically, feeling uh when you feel often when the experience of of s
219. 29:34 with sensations and feelings is very frequent and when you are quickly overwhelmed in everyday life because of
220. 29:41 perceiving more stress horrors. This renders you vulnerable. This
221. 29:48 renders you brittle. It promotes a recurring sense of learned helplessness in the individual or mental state that contributes to depression and anxiety as Jano had observed.
222. 30:02 Other scholars proposed that the association between sensitivity and mental health issues is driven by the depth of processing which refers to deeper cognitive processing of stimuli which is unusual. For example, Leonetti identified rumination as an important
223. 30:18 cognitive risk factor for the development of depressive symptoms in highly sensitive children. Suggested
224. 30:24 that it is exactly this depth of processing that could facilitate rumination and the internalization of problems. Another possible explanation for this mysterious association between
225. 30:35 sensitivity and and mental illness is negative effects or negative
226. 30:41 effectivity. sensitivity, it seems, predisposes you to having
227. 30:47 negative effects s such as, for example, fear or anger or envy.
228. 30:55 And so this gives rise inevitably to depression. Bringle was the first to make this link.
229. 31:02 Bringle focused on emotional reactivity, the tendency of highly sensitive individuals to react strongly with both
230. 31:09 positive and negative feelings. And yet it seems that the more exposed you are
231. 31:15 to stimuli, the more overwhelmed you are by stimuli, the more the more you drown yourself and get immersed in an endless
232. 31:22 stream of cues, inputs, information, stimul stimuli and so on so the more
233. 31:30 likely you are to become defensive because your vulnerability increases and this is the cornerstone of negative effects not positive ones. Brindle
234. 31:41 hypothesized that individuals high in sensitivity are more aware of their negative emotional states while also
235. 31:49 showing lower self-efficacy regarding how they might change their negative emotional states. In other words, when you are more aware, when there’s
236. 32:00 increased awareness of negative emotional states, when you’re more aware of your negative emotional states,
237. 32:06 you’re more aware that you’re angry, that you’re hateful, that you are rageful, that you are envious, that you
238. 32:12 are fearful, anxious. You’re more aware of all these and you don’t have the
239. 32:18 emotional regulation skills to overcome these which again reminiscent a lot of a
240. 32:24 borderline personality organization. This creates this causes recurrent
241. 32:30 feelings of helplessness and negative effects in the individual.
242. 32:36 Theories of sensitivity postulate highly sensitive individuals are not only more affected by adversity but also benefit
243. 32:43 disproportionately from supportive experiences and environments as I mentioned earlier.
244. 32:49 But in truth, most studies support the former. Most studies tend to
245. 32:57 show that hypers sensitivity, heightened sensitivity would inelectably and inexorably lead the individual to a negative territory
246. 33:10 where in these kind of individuals experience negative emotions much more profoundly and much more intensely than
247. 33:17 positive ones. Although in theory they should be open to both types of experiences and be hyperreactive to
248. 33:24 both. I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence for this. It has been shown that individuals with high levels of
249. 33:31 sensitivity benefit from psychological interventions, but uh I don’t know if behavior modification or getting rid of behavioral problems in
250. 33:43 school settings using therapy would be construed a positive experience by the
251. 33:50 children themselves. I doubt it. It has been shown that high levels of
252. 33:57 sensitivity correlate with positive outcomes um an increase in positive effect following positive mood induction and more positive responses to anti-bullying and depression prevention programs in children and adolescence. All these studies, Leonetti, Noentini,
253. 34:15 Bonyuel, all these studies are in school settings. All of them involve children and all of them involve interventions,
254. 34:21 mainly therapy. Why this is considered a positive experience that induces
255. 34:27 positive effects is beyond me. It’s a great mystery. Anyhow, in the study in the article, um the study that I’m analyzing,
256. 34:40 what they did, they aggregated, it’s called meta analysis. They aggregated 33 studies and they revealed positive and moderate correlations between sensitivity and various mental health
257. 34:52 outcomes such as depression, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, obsessivecompulsive disorder,
258. 34:58 post-traumatic stress disorder, agorophobia, social phobia and avoidant personality disorder. There’s a moderate
259. 35:05 and significant association mainly for depression and anxiety. sensitivity correlates with many different common mental health problems beyond depression and anxiety. But the most uh the
260. 35:18 strongest link involves depression and anxiety. And so
261. 35:25 could we use sensitivity as a predictor prognosticator
262. 35:31 or diagnostic marker? That’s still an open question because as I said there’s a chicken and egg
263. 35:38 situation. We are not quite sure what leads to what and why. Based on the findings in the article, the sensitivity framework seems to be in line with a broad approach to ethology,
264. 35:50 conceptualization, and treatment. And this this is because the authors
265. 35:56 advocate for um opening up the diagnostic categories and diagnostic
266. 36:02 specific interventions. They say that sensitivity correlates with many different mental health problems should not be confined to the diagnosis or the treatment of depression and anxiety. It seems feasible, say the authors, and I’m
267. 36:14 quoting, that individuals irrelevant of their diagnosis who score high on sensitivity may especially benefit from treatment plans focusing on strengthening emotional regulation
268. 36:25 skills, applied relaxation, mindfulness, and so on. In turn, individuals with
269. 36:31 high levels of apathy m might respond particularly well to the positive
270. 36:37 effects of arts, music, and nature. Considering the coorbidity of diagnosis and the heterogeneity of clinical presentations in clinical contexts, sensitivity appears to represent a
271. 36:49 promising transdiagnostic risk factor, a predisposition.
272. 36:55 The strength of the overall effect effect size was similar for anxiety and depression. But the association between
273. 37:01 sensitivity and anxiety shows a greater homogeneity. I think
274. 37:07 that future scholars would do well to consider this as a trajectory or a path.
275. 37:13 There’s hyper sensitivity or high sensitivity which leads to
276. 37:20 hypervigilance and catastrophizing which lead to anxiety
277. 37:26 which leads to depression and together this confluence results in
278. 37:32 mental health issues such as borderline personality disorder and and others where emotional dysregulation or emotion dysregulation is a major clinical feature.
279. 37:45 Um the authors continue to say one possible explanation for this for the fact that
280. 37:51 there’s homogeneity uh in the in the association between sensitivity and anxiety. One possible explanation for
281. 37:58 this could be that core aspects of sensitivity such as depth of processing or the tendency to respond with over
282. 38:05 stimulation are more similar or overlap with symptoms of anxiety rather than symptoms of depression. regardless of environmental influences. For example, feeling physically and emotionally
283. 38:17 aroused because of over stimulation is likely experienced as feeling anxious or could lead to feelings of anxiety and subsequent avoidance of certain situations. depth of processing might reflect a tendency to worry about future outcomes
284. 38:33 catastrophizing or could lead to imagining possible future scenarios in a
285. 38:39 given situation that could account for some anxiety. Depression on the other hand might be more dependent on the
286. 38:45 environmental factors and the quality thereof. For example, the authors give some
287. 38:51 examples. Some studies have shown lower levels of depression in highly sensitive individuals who have grown up in
288. 38:58 supportive and positive environments but higher levels of depression in highly sensitive individuals who have grown up
289. 39:04 in adverse emotionally unsupportive environments. That is a study by slammed S L A GT. And so the likely variability uh I’m continuing to quote the article. Hence the likely variability in
290. 39:20 environmental quality between individuals and samples might account for greater heterogeneity in the
291. 39:26 association between sensitivity and depression. All the suggestions for the reasons why sensitivity correlates with
292. 39:33 mental health outcomes focus not on the global trait as such but on specific
293. 39:39 aspects of the trait such as depth of processing, emotional reactivity and over stimulation.
294. 39:45 Looking beyond the correlation with depression and anxiety, it is noticeable that we found moderate and positive
295. 39:51 correlations with agorophobia and avoidant personality disorders in three studies. Hoffman and Bitran Meer and
296. 39:58 Carver Neil. These correlations, addition to the moderate correlation with social introversion, found in pre
297. 40:06 in a previous study by Eron, invite the question of whether agorophobic withdrawal and avoidance could be
298. 40:13 interpreted as maladaptive coping strategies in response to over stimulation and emotional reactivity. Strategies that are particularly common in individuals with high levels of
299. 40:25 sensitivity. So that’s the overview. sensitivity seems to be present in a variety of
300. 40:32 mental health issues. However, we have no idea whether the sensitivity cause these mental health issues or vice versa. And at any rate, the authors are right
301. 40:45 that we the same way we use other traits to diagnose, to prognosticate, to
302. 40:51 predict, to treat, we should begin to use sensitivity because sensitivity clearly is a predisposing factor
303. 41:00 and possibly, as future studies might show, a factor of personality as well.