Emotions are emotive (Image: Darren Hopes)
Ever started the day positively and full of determination, only to have someone whip the carpet from beneath your feet with an angry comment? Find yourself easily overwhelmed by hunger, sirens, strong smells or bright lights? Were you a shy or withdrawn child? If you answered yes to some or all of these questions, you may be a “highly sensitive person”.
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Or do you tend to stay cool, calm and collected, not let other people’s emotions influence you and have a strong sense of your own worth? If so, you may chart on the psychopathy scale established in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Robert Hare.
“Tend to stay cool, calm and collected? You may well chart on a psychopathy scale”
Highly sensitive, or psychopathic – those are labels that most of us would rather not acquire. But psychologists have devised many scales to assess the human emotional range, and we are unlikely to get an average score on all of them. According to psychologist of Stony Brook University in New York, for example, the “highly sensitive” tag accounts for about one in five of us.
Early indications are that a messy mix of thousands of genes determines something like our sensitivity to the environment, says of Queen Mary University of London – and that’s just one factor that determines our emotional make-up. In the past decade, psychologists have identified dozens of genetic variants more common in highly sensitive people that, for example, regulate key hormones such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. Pluess has found that many of these genes increase activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing emotions.
It’s not all bad news, however. Although highly sensitive people can often be overwhelmed by negatives, Pluess has found they are also , are deeper thinkers and are often more creative. Higher sensitivity to external cues may also make them better at adapting to new environments, an evolutionarily advantageous trait. As a general rule, sensitive people also tend to score higher on empathy tests, says of the University of Sussex in the UK.
Conversely, individuals lacking in empathy or remorse may be desirable when group interests need to be put ahead of individual ones. “These are the people who will fire large numbers of people for the good of the corporation,” says Garfinkel.
The fact that evolution hasn’t selected for any particular combination of genes suggests a mix of people with different character traits is a healthy situation. And while clear outliers do exist – the extreme psychopathy that leads to cold-blooded killing, for example – our emotional reactions are generally kept from running riot by the circuits that connect the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s thinking area, to the amygdala. “That means that in a healthy brain, you can, to some extent, control your emotional reactions with reasoned thought,” says Garfinkel.
Want to know if you are a highly sensitive person? For a more comprehensive list of traits, have a look at Elaine Aron’s questionnaires at
Read more: “Is your mind normal? 7 reasons it probably is”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Are my emotions normal?”
