Part I: Summary of Some of the Latest Interesting Research & Part II The Season of (Not) Light

With my upcoming book, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens: An Objective Look at Meditation Methods and Enlightenment (coming out this April), I’ll be sharing two parts in each blog post—the first will explore research, HSP news, and current insights, while the second will offer a more spiritual reflection and deeper inner perspective.  

Part I:

Summary of Some of the Latest Interesting Research and Part II The Season of (Not) Light 

A Burst of New Research

Acevedo, B. P., & Lionetti, F. (2025). Advances in research on sensory processing sensitivity.  Frontiers in Psychology ,  16 , 1724138.

The journal Frontiers in Psychology likes to put out a call for papers devoted to a particular research topics and have editors for that topic. Papers are published over a span of time as work is completed, and the topic has editors who know that topic well.  In this case Bianca Acevedo and Francesa Lionetti have been the editors for the research topic titled “Sensory processing sensitivity research: Recent advances,” They have now produced a summary of the 17 papers published under this topic. It is relatively short and easy to read, so rather than me summarizing a summary, I suggest you read it yourself. So much research is being done on HSPs! Read full article here. 

 

HS College students Are More likely Than Others to Misuse the Internet if They had Poor Parenting, but Less Likely if They Had Good Parenting

Ke, X., & Wang, Z. (2025). The longitudinal impact of parenting styles on pathological internet use among college students: The mediating role of rumination and the moderating role of environmental sensitivity.  Behavioral Sciences .

Pathological Internet Use (PIU) refers to excessive time spent online by individuals, leading to negative effects on an individual’s physical, psychological, and social functioning. This study was done in China, where 652 college freshmen were asked three times over one year to take the Parenting Style Questionnaire, the Pathological Internet Use Scale, the Rumination Thinking Scale and the HSP Scale. Positive parenting at time 1 (T1) led to lower PIU at time 3 (T3 PIU), while T1 negative parenting led to significantly greater PIU at time 3 (T3). Rumination measured at time 2 (T2) helped predict the degree to which T1 parenting styles led PIU at T3. 

Important to us, being an HSP increased these effects. For them, positive parenting at T1 led to even lower PIU at time 3, while negative parenting at T1 led to even greater PIU at time 3 (T3), especially if there was rumination present too. All of this supports the differential susceptibility model. Good parenting helps HSPs more and poor parenting hurts them more.

Bottom Line: HS college students will use the internet in a healthy way if they have had good parenting, but veer into using it pathologically if they have had bad parenting.  Once again, differential susceptibility predicts the results.

 

Highly Sensitive Children (HSCs) Gain More than Others from Social Skills and Anti-Bullying Programs

Acevedo, B. P., Sperati, A., Williams, C., Griffin, K. W., Tork, A., & Botvin, G. J. (2025). The moderating role of sensory processing sensitivity in social skills enhancement and bullying prevention among adolescents.  Behavioral Sciences ,  15 (10), 1344.

You might remember that a study had already been done on bullying, finding that HSCs, boys specifically, gained more than others from a bullying prevention program. (See Nocentini, A., Menesini, E., & Pluess, M. (2018). “The personality trait of environmental sensitivity predicts children’s positive response to school-based antibullying intervention.” Clinical Psychological Science, 6(6), 848-859.) It was the first article reviewed in this post. The present study included a life skills enhancement program as well as the bullying prevention aspect. Participants were 301 middle-school students (average age 12), who filled out measures of their social competency and bullying-prevention skills before and after the 4-week training, as well as the HSC Scale. 

Analyses revealed that the HSCs showed the greatest increases in several personal and interpersonal competencies, including decision-making skills, media resistance skills, social skills, bullying resistance skills, and bullying bystander intervention skills, compared to students without the HS trait. This is another example of differential susceptibility—that HSPs may suffer more than others in poor environments, but gain more than others in good environments, such as helpful interventions

Bottom Line:  With some instruction, middle-school-aged HSCs more than other kids can make great decisions, resist the media, be socially competent, avoid bullying, and step in when they see bullying happening.  So let’s be sure they receive the teaching they can benefit from so nicely. 

 

HSPs Experience Fatigue When They Have to “Tune Out” Noise in Order to Listen to Someone

McGarrigle, R., & Mattys, S. (2023). Sensory-processing sensitivity predicts fatigue from listening, but not perceived effort, in young and older adults.  Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research ,  66 (2), 444-460.

McGarrigle, R., Knight, S., Hornsby, B. W., & Mattys, S. (2021). Predictors of listening-related fatigue across the adult life span.  Psychological Science ,  32 (12), 1937-1951.

In a study published in 2021, researchers were looking for predictors of listening-related fatigue. No, not getting tired of listening patiently as a friend talks about their divorce or a colleague about their boss, but how tired you feel after a standardized task in which you are told to listen to two things at once but only attend to one. (Much like trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy restaurant.) Using a large sample (281) of adults, they found that while hearing loss was related to listening fatigue, as they expected, SPS was also an important factor. Specifically, the higher the SPS score, and in addition the more that one did the listening task well, the more listening fatigue. That is, the more that HSPs did well at the task, presumably working hard on it, the more tired they were by it.

In a later study, both 206 young (18-39) and 122 older (60-80) adults were given the same kind of task and this time given questionnaires about the effort they thought they had made and the fatigue they felt afterwards as well as the HSP Scale. Again, HSPs reported more listening-related fatigue than others of their age, regardless of their level of hearing loss or skill at the task. The authors concluded that that SPS is a better predictor of listening-related fatigue than performance on the task or effort ratings. It seems that SPS has arrived in yet another area of research—listening fatigue.

Bottom Line: In a situation with too much stimuli, HSPs are more tired out by the effort of listening, even though they may listen very well.  No surprise to you, right?

 

Part II The Season of (Not) Light 

Many HSPs comment on not feeling as good when the days get shorter, especially when it gets cloudy too. It’s something else we are more sensitive to—the change of seasons. The days are getting longer in the Southern Hemisphere right now. Hurray for them. But I’m up here in the northern one and notice the shortening days. “Seasonal Affective Disorder?” More people with SAD are also HSPs. But I call mine Seasonal Affective Disappointment. Not quite a disorder, causing no impairment. But I do look forward to the winter solstice, December 21, 7:03 am, when the days will start getting longer. Soon it will be May, the swimming pool where we live will reopen, I will swim every day I can, and all will be well again. 

Light. Light. Never mind that the winter solstice marks the first day of winter. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. We think humans worried a lot in the past about the shortening days, always hoping the trend will reverse this year, too, and marking the exact date when it should happen with standing stones aligned with whatever, or just markings on stones. Meanwhile, humans have these holidays around lights to cheer us up. We know pagans were big on bonfires at this time of year, but now we have Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, Kwanzaa, Diwali (in October), Lunar New Year (East Asia), with all their lights–Christmas trees, menorahs, all kinds of other candles, lights on roof tops and lawns, headdresses with candles worn by young Swedish girls on Saint Lucia day. Does it help? I guess, although there is not much in the way of festivities after New Years until Valentine’s Day, which is just a so-so holiday–and then finally Easter/Passover. Spring. 

I suppose the title of this little outburst, “The Season of (Not) Light,” may have led you to expect something about depression, loneliness, and overstimulation during the holidays. If you use this website’s search box and type in “holidays,” you will see what I have written several times in the past about avoiding overstimulation. Depression and loneliness are bigger topics, requiring your seeking out some help and companionship. Please do. I am just going to go on about light.

Light. Spiritual traditions talk about enlightenment, and spiritual teachers liken pure consciousness or pure awareness to light, in that as we look at things, pure consciousness or pure awareness is always there—no one has ever experienced anything without being conscious, being aware—and yet awareness itself, like light, is not itself visible. But that is obviously only an analogy, since light does come and go, and people can experience the world without light. Blind people do it all the time.  Indeed, they can become enlightened—permanently aware of awareness itself, without any outer light to enlighten them.

Since we are in the subject, and this is also the time of year for giving gifts, I am going to give you a gift in the form of a suggested reading, one very related to blindness and enlightenment. It is scary in parts, having to do with a blind fighter in the French Resistance who ends up caught, of course, so I am warning you, but also telling you that the ending is brilliant, happy.  Full of light. To introduce it I have inserted something from my book, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens, coming out March 31:

Finally, there is the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II, which was rated by a panel assembled by Harper Collins as one of the one hundred best spiritual books of the twentieth century. He describes his awakening (although he did not have a term for it) while near death in Buchenwald, the Nazi prison camp…. His awakening is an example of an extraordinary, persistent state of consciousness that happened without him or those around him having any concept of enlightenment.  

Curious about whether Lusseyran’s state persisted, I found one more book by him [in 1958 he moved to the U.S. and taught French at various universities], six essays under the title Against the Pollution of the I. In the title essay, you sense his desire to give others what he has but cannot name. In the next essay he describes Jeremy, a fellow prisoner at Buchenwald, a plain-spoken welder, given the name Socrates by the prisoners. Wherever Jeremy went, people wanted to be near him, yet gave him the personal space not given to others. As Lusseyran describes him, Jeremy was a source of silent calm and joy where there seemed to be no reason. There is no doubt that Jeremy would qualify as enlightened. 

While I was writing this blog post, the sun came out.  First time in days. The weather report says it will not be out tomorrow or the next day. So I went and basked in the sun, ate breakfast in the sun, talked to a friend while sitting in the sun, puttered with my potted plants, who were so happy to see the sun—it was delicious. And I found my ideas all dried up like the muddy sidewalks. Sorry, but I’m ending this. I hope you can find some sunshine too.

Except, here’s your homework: See if you can notice your own awareness in the background of everything you do. It is quiet, simple, and sweet like the sun. No words, no thoughts, no feelings–just pure whatever. Unbounded, infinite. However you want to describe it. Can you sense it? If you can, keep coming back to it.