Sensitivity on the Wards: One in Ten Future Nurses and Social Workers Is Highly Sensitive, Finnish Study Finds

A sweeping survey of nearly 1,200 Finnish students training for careers in nursing, social services, and allied health professions has delivered the first detailed portrait of sensory processing sensitivity in this workforce pipeline, and the numbers carry a pointed message for educators and employers alike. The study, published in Current Psychology, found that roughly 11 percent of social and healthcare higher education students qualify as highly sensitive in both positive and negative dimensions of the trait, while nearly a third sit in the ‘rather highly sensitive’ category. Only 7.4 percent fell into the low-sensitivity group. With the World Health Organization warning of a global shortage of health and care workers, and burnout and retention perennial problems in the sector, understanding how many future professionals process environmental stimuli with unusual depth is far more than an academic curiosity. It could shape how classrooms, clinical placements, and eventually workplaces are designed.

Sensory processing sensitivity, often abbreviated SPS, is an innate and heritable temperament trait first described systematically by psychologists Elaine Aron and Arthur Aron in 1997. It is characterised by heightened sensitivity to environmental stimuli, deep cognitive processing of information, and intense emotional and physiological reactivity, including strong empathic responses. People high in the trait, often called highly sensitive persons, tend to experience loud noises, hectic environments, and social demands more intensely than others, and they may tip more easily into overarousal. Crucially, SPS is a personality trait, not a psychiatric diagnosis, and it comes with a flip side: neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have shown increased activation in brain regions associated with empathy, awareness, and reflective thinking in highly sensitive individuals. In professions built on human connection, that empathy may be an asset, even as the accompanying vulnerability to overload becomes a liability.

The theoretical backdrop for the new research is the Environmental Sensitivity framework, which treats sensitivity as a continuum of differential responsiveness to external influences. Within this umbrella sit three key theories: Biological Sensitivity to Context, which views stress reactivity as a marker of heightened biological responsiveness to one’s surroundings; Differential Susceptibility, which holds that some individuals are shaped more strongly than others by both negative and positive environments; and Sensory Processing Sensitivity itself. The framework’s most famous metaphor, coined by researcher Francesca Lionetti and colleagues, sorts people into dandelions, tulips, and orchids, hardy, middle-of-the-road, and exquisitely sensitive respectively. The orchid metaphor matters for the study’s conclusions: orchids wither in hostile conditions but flourish spectacularly in supportive ones, which is precisely why the researchers argue that sensitivity should be seen as a neutral trait with both strengths and challenges rather than a defect to be managed.

To measure the trait, the team, led by Jatta Törmänen and Kristina Mikkonen of the University of Oulu together with colleagues at Lapland University of Applied Sciences, used the Sensory Processing Sensitivity Questionnaire, a 43-item instrument validated by Vasily De Gucht and colleagues. The SPSQ captures six dimensions: four positive ones, namely social-affective sensitivity, aesthetic sensitivity, sensory comfort or pleasure, and sensitivity to subtle internal and external stimuli, and two negative ones, emotional and physiological reactivity and sensory discomfort. Respondents rate each item on a seven-point scale. The Finnish team translated the instrument using a back-translation procedure with four independent researchers, verified its content with a six-member expert panel, achieving content validity indices above 0.94 for both relevance and clarity, and piloted it with eight students before launch. Internal consistency was acceptable to good across most dimensions in the sample, although the sensory discomfort dimension showed weaker reliability.

The survey reached students at 11 universities of applied sciences across Finland between October 2024 and January 2025, drawing 1,185 usable responses from a sampling frame of 24,951. Most participants were female, 89.5 percent, aged between 20 and 29, and enrolled in social services or registered nursing programmes. The researchers classified participants into five sensitivity levels using a model-based clustering tool that groups individuals into latent sensitivity profiles based on their response patterns, then used binary logistic regression to identify which background factors predicted membership in the higher-sensitivity clusters. Reporting followed the STROBE guidelines for observational studies, and a supplementary linear regression using the continuous SPSQ score checked that the main findings survived the dichotomisation of the outcome.

The regression results were striking in places. Each additional year of age raised the odds of high sensitivity by about 5.7 percent. Students with a confirmed ADHD diagnosis were more than 3.6 times as likely to be highly sensitive, an association that carried one of the largest effect sizes in the study, with a Cohen’s d of 0.71. Those with an anxiety disorder had over 2.7 times higher odds, and students reporting mental overload in either previous or current studies had roughly double the odds. Difficulty adjusting to changing situations emerged as the single strongest situational correlate, with students reporting high mental effort in such situations showing odds 3.5 times greater than those finding change easy. Struggling to perform in front of a large audience also predicted higher sensitivity in the primary model, though this effect did not replicate in the supplementary continuous analysis and should be treated cautiously, as should the finding that social services students had more than twice the odds of high sensitivity.

Some of the mental health context behind these odds ratios is sobering. A third of all participants reported a diagnosis of depression, 32.6 percent reported an anxiety disorder, and one in ten reported ADHD, a figure well above the 2 to 3 percent adult prevalence reported globally. Nearly half of the students reported mental overload in their earlier studies and over 40 percent in their current ones. Among the highly sensitive subgroup specifically, 20 percent had ADHD, 43 percent had depression or an anxiety disorder, and 55 percent reported mental overload. The researchers note that national Finnish surveys have recorded a doubling of neurodevelopmental disorders among higher education students since 2021, a trend whose causes remain unclear and which they flag as a priority for further investigation.

Interpretation requires care on several fronts. The cross-sectional design forbids any causal reading: it is equally plausible that highly sensitive people gravitate toward caring professions as that these professions amplify sensitivity. The authors point to vocational selection as a likely process, noting that the empathic disposition linked to SPS may draw people toward social services, where students indeed showed the highest proportion of elevated sensitivity, while emergency nursing students showed the lowest. Self-selection in the survey is another concern, with a response rate of just 4.75 percent and the possibility that students most interested in sensitivity, or most affected by overload, were overrepresented, though the opposite could also hold if the most distressed lacked the capacity to respond. Conceptual overlap between SPS and internalising symptoms such as anxiety further complicates matters, and the moderate explained variance of the models, roughly 27 to 37 percent, signals that personality traits, learning environments, and social support not measured here also play roles.

Despite these caveats, the practical implications are concrete. Prior research has shown that highly sensitive paramedics find ambulance alarms more stressful than colleagues do, and that SPS predicts stress and burnout in registered nurses, while resilience-building interventions have reduced depression and boosted self-esteem in sensitive adolescents. The study’s authors recommend that educational institutions embed preventive mental health support and resilience training into social and healthcare curricula, use simulation and virtual reality to let sensitive students rehearse clinical situations safely before placements, and develop mentoring and peer support schemes. Educators who express genuine concern for student well-being, they note, play a pivotal role in building professional self-regulation skills. Employers, meanwhile, are urged to consider the needs of highly sensitive staff when shaping work environments and management practices.

The deeper message may be the reframing itself. Within the Environmental Sensitivity framework, the same nervous system that makes a student vulnerable to a chaotic emergency department makes them exceptionally attuned to a patient’s unspoken distress, and more responsive than most to supportive conditions, good mentoring, and well-designed interventions. The researchers explicitly warn against over-pathologising a trait that brings empathy, creativity, awareness, and receptivity to intervention alongside its costs. As the next generation of nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, and social workers enters a strained sector, the study suggests that recognising sensitivity in all its dimensions, and designing education and workplaces around it, could help retain the very professionals the system can least afford to lose.

Subject of Research: Prevalence and correlates of sensory processing sensitivity among social and healthcare higher education students in Finland

Article Title: Sensory processing sensitivity and associated factors among social and healthcare higher education students -a cross-sectional study

Article References: Törmänen, J., Mikkonen, K., Jarva, E., Canino, T., & Pramila-Savukoski, S. (2026). Sensory processing sensitivity and associated factors among social and healthcare higher education students -a cross-sectional study. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1617. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10162-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10162-0

Keywords: sensory processing sensitivity, highly sensitive persons, healthcare education, nursing students, ADHD, anxiety disorder, mental overload, cross-sectional study, environmental sensitivity, student well-being, burnout, Finland