A highly sensitive person (HSP) is a person having the innate trait of high psychological sensitivity (or innate sensitiveness as Carl Jung originally coined it). According to Elaine N. Aron and colleagues as well as other researchers, highly sensitive people, who comprise about a fifth of the population, may process sensory data much more deeply and thoroughly due to a biological difference in their nervous systems.
This is a specific trait with key consequences that in the past has often been confused with innate shyness, social anxiety problems, inhibitedness, or even social phobia and innate fearfulness, introversion, and so on. The existence of the trait of innate sensitivity was demonstrated using a test that was shown to have both internal and external validity. Although the term is primarily used to describe humans, the trait is present in nearly all higher animals.
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^ Ketay, S., Hedden, T., Aron, A., Aron, E., Markus, H., & Gabrieli, G. (2007, January). The personality/temperament trait of high sensitivity: fMRI evidence for independence of cultural context in attentional processing. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Memphis, TN. Summary by Aron (2006): "A functional study comparing brain activation in Asians recently arrived in the United States to European-Americans found that in the nonsensitive, different areas were activated according to culture during a difficult discrimination task known to be affected by culture, but culture had no impact on the activated areas for highly sensitive subjects, as if they were able to view the stimuli without cultural influence."
^ Brodt, S.; Zimbardo, P. (1981). "Modifying Shyness-Related Social Behavior Through Symptom Misattribution". Journal of Personality and Society Psychology 41 (3): 437–49. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.41.3.437.
^ a b {{cite journal | last1=Aron | first1=E.N. |url=http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV8N2p11-44.pdf |title=The Clinical Implications of Jungs Concept of Sensitiveness| journal= Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice| volume= 8|year= 2006|pages= 11–43}
