The popular theory that highly sensitive people detect more sensory information than others just ran into a laboratory that found no evidence it is true

The concept of the highly sensitive person has become one of the most widely adopted frameworks in popular psychology. Introduced by psychologist Elaine Aron in the 1990s, it describes a trait she called sensory processing sensitivity: a heritable tendency toward deep processing of sensory and emotional information, heightened awareness of subtleties in the environment, and strong emotional reactivity. By Aron’s estimates, roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population carries the trait. Millions of people have recognized themselves in the description, and the HSP identity has found a particularly large home online, where communities built around it share strategies for managing overstimulation and validate each other’s experiences of a world that often feels overwhelming.

Central to how many highly sensitive people understand themselves is the belief that they literally perceive more than others do. That their hearing is sharper. That smells hit them harder. That lights are brighter to them than to someone without the trait. The language used in popular accounts of high sensitivity routinely implies genuine sensory superiority, a more finely tuned instrument pointed at the same world everyone else inhabits.

A new study from the University of Bern has tested that belief against objective measurement and found it does not hold. Highly sensitive people do not detect weaker sounds, dimmer lights, subtler smells, or lower temperatures than people without the trait. Their sensory organs are not more acute by any measure the researchers could assess in the laboratory. What is different is how they interpret and respond to the sensory information those organs deliver, and that distinction, between what the senses detect and what the mind does with that detection, turns out to matter enormously for understanding what sensory processing sensitivity actually is.

What the study measured

The research team, led by Danièle Gubler at the University of Bern, recruited 150 women and administered two validated questionnaires measuring sensory processing sensitivity, along with personality measures assessing neuroticism and extraversion. Participants then underwent an extensive battery of laboratory assessments covering five sensory domains: hearing, vision, temperature, smell, and balance.

The tests measured two distinct thresholds in each domain. Detection thresholds establish the minimum intensity at which a person can reliably notice a stimulus — how quiet a tone must be before it disappears from awareness, how faint a light before it is no longer visible, how slight a temperature change before the skin stops registering it. Pain or discomfort thresholds establish the intensity at which a stimulus transitions from neutral to uncomfortable. Both types of threshold provide objective, standardized measures of sensory capability that do not depend on self-report.

After completing the sensory tests, participants also rated how sensitive they believed themselves to be in each domain. This allowed the researchers to compare three distinct layers of information: actual sensory performance on the laboratory tests, overall SPS scores from the questionnaires, and participants’ own perceptions of their sensory abilities.

What the objective tests revealed

The pattern across the sensory tests was consistent. Participants who scored highly on sensory processing sensitivity questionnaires did not perform differently from low-scorers on the objective laboratory measures. They did not detect sounds at lower volumes. They did not register lights at lower intensities. Their temperature detection was not more precise. Their smell detection was not more acute. Their balance thresholds did not differ from those of participants who scored low on SPS.

The finding held across both detection thresholds, the minimum stimulus required to notice something at all, and pain or discomfort thresholds, the level at which stimulation becomes aversive. If high sensitivity conferred genuine sensory acuity, the clearest signal would appear in detection thresholds: highly sensitive people should notice things at lower intensities. It did not appear.

The researchers also found no evidence that sensory ability across different modalities reflects a single underlying sensory trait. How well a person hears is largely unrelated to how precisely they detect temperature changes or how acutely they smell. Sensory systems operate with considerable independence from each other, and no general sensitivity factor unified the different modalities within the sample.

“The present findings suggest that SPS is not characterized by enhanced sensory acuity,” the authors wrote, “but rather by the subjective experience and evaluation of sensory input.”

What highly sensitive people actually experience differently

The subjective ratings told a different story from the objective tests. Participants with higher SPS scores consistently described themselves as more sensitive across sensory domains, and reported lower pain thresholds more strongly than participants with lower SPS scores.

This means that the experience of being highly sensitive — the feeling of being more affected by sensory input — is real. The study does not challenge that. What it challenges is the mechanism behind that experience. Highly sensitive people are not receiving more intense sensory signals from sharper instruments. They are processing and evaluating the same sensory signals differently, in a way that amplifies their subjective impact while leaving the objective input unchanged.

The most significant finding came when the researchers controlled for two broad personality traits: neuroticism and extraversion. After accounting for these factors, many of the associations between SPS scores and self-reported sensitivity weakened substantially. Neuroticism, the tendency toward anxiety, worry, emotional instability, and negative affect, appeared to explain a meaningful portion of the self-reported sensitivity that the SPS questionnaires were capturing.

This finding suggests that a significant component of what existing SPS questionnaires measure may reflect neuroticism rather than a distinct sensitivity trait. People with high neuroticism feel their emotional and sensory experiences more intensely not because their sensory organs are more acute but because their nervous systems assign greater threat salience and emotional weight to incoming stimulation. The world does not arrive differently at the ears and eyes. It is responded to differently somewhere further along the chain of processing.

What this means for understanding the HSP concept

The researchers are careful to note what this study does not establish. A limitation of objective sensory threshold tests is that they capture basic perceptual ability in controlled, low-complexity conditions. A quiet laboratory room presenting a tone at controlled volumes is different from a crowded restaurant where background noise, multiple conversations, flickering lights, and food smells all compete for attention simultaneously. Highly sensitive people’s self-reported difficulties consistently involve complex, multi-source environments rather than the detection of a single isolated stimulus. The study cannot determine whether SPS confers advantages in detecting subtle patterns within complex environments even when single-stimulus detection thresholds are normal.

The sample also consisted entirely of young women, which limits generalizability to men and to older populations. And because participants were tested only once, the study cannot speak to whether sensitivity thresholds change over time or in response to different states such as stress, fatigue, or illness.

But the core finding creates a specific challenge for the theoretical framework underlying the HSP concept. Aron’s original description of sensory processing sensitivity emphasized awareness of subtleties as one of its defining features, implying that highly sensitive people notice more in their environment. If that noticing is not rooted in objectively superior detection but in the subjective evaluation of normally detected input, the mechanism is different from what the theory implies. The sensitivity is real but it lives in interpretation, not in the sensory organs themselves.

For the millions of people who identify as highly sensitive, the distinction may feel semantic. The experience of being overwhelmed by stimulation that others seem to navigate easily is not made less real by knowing that the overwhelming happens downstream of detection rather than at it. But for clinicians, researchers, and the broader understanding of how sensory processing sensitivity relates to other psychological traits, the location of the sensitivity matters. If it is primarily an expression of neuroticism operating through a particular cognitive style, the interventions that help are likely different from those that would help if the sensitivity were a straightforward matter of sensory organ acuity.

The study opens a more specific question about what exactly highly sensitive people process differently and where in the neural chain that different processing occurs. Laboratory measures of detection thresholds are not the right tool to answer that question. The answer will require studies with more naturalistic sensory environments, more refined measures of attentional processing and emotional evaluation, and eventually, neuroimaging capable of tracking the signal from sense organ to conscious experience.

Source

Danièle A. Gubler, Matthias Ertl, Tobias Janelt, Marcus Roth, Stefan J. Troche. “Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is not a sensory ability: Examining the relationship of SPS with objectively and subjectively measured sensory sensitivity.” Journal of Research in Personality, 2026.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2026.104730