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

Selective mutism is an anxiety disorder in which a child fails to speak in particular social or unfamiliar settings, most commonly at school or in public, despite producing fluent speech at home. Estimates suggest the condition affects at least 0.2 to 2 percent of the population, and documented prevalence continues to rise as awareness and assessment improve. The consequences are far from trivial. Children with selective mutism show impairments in academic achievement, social interaction, and general functioning wherever speaking is demanded of them, along with elevated rates of comorbid psychiatric conditions, most often social anxiety disorder. Long-term follow-up studies indicate that untreated selective mutism can predict persistent social skills deficits, educational and occupational difficulties, and low self-esteem well into adolescence and adulthood. Despite this burden, research into the family dynamics that sustain the disorder has lagged behind work on other childhood anxiety conditions, and the study’s authors argue that a missing measurement tool is a central reason why.

Family accommodation was first described in the context of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder in the mid-1990s, where clinicians noticed that relatives often participated in a child’s rituals or modified their own routines to reduce the child’s distress. The concept has since expanded across the full spectrum of childhood anxiety. Research indicates that as many as 88 to 97 percent of caregivers of anxious children engage in at least some accommodating behavior. In the short term, accommodation works: the child’s distress drops, the household regains calm. But that relief operates as negative reinforcement, teaching both child and parent that avoidance is the solution. Over time, the child is deprived of opportunities to develop independent mastery and self-efficacy, to learn through experience that feared outcomes rarely materialize. A meta-analysis by Iniesta-Sepúlveda and colleagues found that accommodation tracks anxiety severity across development, and that age does not meaningfully moderate the link, meaning these dynamics matter as much for adolescents as for preschoolers.

The problem, the researchers explain, is that generic accommodation measures may systematically miss the accommodations that define selective mutism. Established instruments such as the Family Accommodation Scale–Anxiety, the Pediatric Accommodation Scale, and the Family Accommodation Checklist and Interference Scale ask parents broad questions about modifying routines, facilitating avoidance, or providing reassurance. None specify anything about verbal contexts. A parent who speaks for their child dozens of times a day may not conceptualize that behavior as accommodation at all, and will therefore score low on a generic scale even while carrying out a textbook avoidance-enabling behavior dozens of times each week. Only three prior studies had examined accommodation in selective mutism, with mixed findings: two found significant associations with symptom severity, one did not. The inconsistency, the team hypothesized, might be an artifact of the instruments themselves.

To build a better tool, Kamenetskiy, Furr, Herrera, and their collaborators generated an initial pool of 21 items organized into four conceptually distinct sections, drawing on their own clinical expertise and consultation with ten therapists who carry heavy caseloads of selective mutism cases. The first three sections probe how often caregivers speak or answer for their child (surrogate speaking), allow whispered communication, and permit purely nonverbal communication such as nodding or pointing. Crucially, each of these sections asks about five specific situations: interactions with familiar adults, strangers, familiar peers, unfamiliar peers, and ordering at a restaurant, a structure that mirrors functional assessment tools used in the field. The fourth section covers instrumental accommodation, meaning active efforts to restructure situations that demand speech, such as persuading a teacher to excuse the child from a class presentation or accompanying the child on field trips in case speaking is required. Each item is rated from zero (never) to five (always), and a Spanish version was subjected to rigorous translation and back-translation.

The sample was unusually well suited to the question: 412 treatment-seeking anxious youth aged 2 to 18 and their caregivers, recruited from two university-affiliated specialty anxiety clinics, the Mental health Interventions and Novel Therapeutics Program at Florida International University and the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. Slightly more than half of the children, 217 of them, met diagnostic criteria for selective mutism, a far higher proportion than in typical anxiety samples. Diagnoses were established with the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Children and Parents, administered by trained assessors with documented interrater reliability exceeding a kappa of 0.80. Roughly half the sample was Hispanic and/or Latinx, and families could complete questionnaires in English or Spanish, an important consideration given the elevated prevalence concerns for selective mutism in multilingual communities.

The psychometric analysis relied on confirmatory factor analysis using polychoric correlation matrices and weighted least squares estimation, appropriate for the ordinal rating-scale data, with maximum likelihood estimation run in parallel as a robustness check. Four theoretically derived models competed. A single-factor model including all 21 items fit poorly, as did four-factor models retaining all items or excluding items about familiar adults. The winning model dropped the three items concerning interactions with familiar peers, yielding an 18-item, four-factor structure corresponding to the subscales of Surrogate Speaking, Permitting of Whispered Communication, Permitting of Nonverbal Communication, and Instrumental Accommodation, with all fit indices landing in the good range. Internal consistency was excellent, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.94 for the total score and between 0.86 and 0.94 for the subscales, alongside a Spearman-Brown split-half reliability of 0.84 and an average inter-item correlation of 0.42.

The clinical findings were striking. Nearly everyone accommodates: 96.1 percent of caregivers reported engaging in at least one of the assessed behaviors when their child’s speech was expected. The single most common accommodation was speaking for one’s child with strangers, reported at least sometimes by 75 percent of the full sample, and by 87.6 percent of parents of children with selective mutism, 73.3 percent of whom did so often or always. After statistically controlling for child age and the number of anxiety diagnoses, caregivers of children with selective mutism scored significantly higher than other anxious families on the SAVE total and on every one of the four subscales, results that survived Holm-Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. Convergent validity was supported by significant correlations with general accommodation measures, selective mutism symptoms on the Selective Mutism Questionnaire, and internalizing problems on the Child Behavior Checklist, while associations with externalizing problems were weak and non-significant when internalizing symptoms were modeled simultaneously, evidence of divergent validity.

Perhaps most importantly, the SAVE demonstrated incremental validity. In three hierarchical regression models, general family accommodation measured by the FASA or the FACLIS predicted selective mutism severity on its own, but once the SAVE entered the equation, its contributions shrank to negligible levels while the SAVE accounted for large additional portions of variance. In other words, the SAVE captures something that established instruments miss: the subtle rescue behaviors embedded in everyday verbal encounters. Notably, familiar peers dropped out of the final factor structure entirely, which the authors interpret intriguingly. Children with selective mutism often have a trusted friend or two with whom they speak, and those friends sometimes end up speaking for the child at school. Familiar peers, the authors suggest, may function less as triggers for parental accommodation and more as agents of accommodation themselves, a dynamic that deserves its own line of research.

The authors are careful to note limitations. The SAVE relies on a single caregiver’s self-report, mostly mothers, and does not yet assess the distress or interference that accommodation causes, nor was it compared against the Pediatric Accommodation Scale. The cross-sectional design precludes conclusions about temporal precedence or causality, and the sample skewed toward White, middle-to-high socioeconomic status, treatment-seeking families. Still, the implications are substantial. Prior work in pediatric OCD and anxiety has shown that reductions in accommodation can drive downstream improvements in child symptoms, and the SAVE now gives researchers a tool to test whether the same mechanism operates in selective mutism treatment, potentially clarifying the active ingredients of family-based interventions adapted from Parent-Child Interaction Therapy and intensive group behavioral treatment. For clinicians, the measure offers a way to individualize case conceptualization, set concrete treatment targets, and track family change over time. For parents, the message embedded in the data is gently sobering: answering for a quiet child at the counter may ease the moment, but the evidence suggests that the road out of silence runs through the very encounters families have learned to bypass.