Elaine Aron's book
The Highly Sensitive Person was published in 1996. In 1997 Elaine and
Arthur Aron formally identified
sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) as the defining trait of highly sensitive persons (HSPs). The popular terms
hypersensitivity (not to be confused with the medical physiological term
hypersensitivity) or
highly sensitive are popular synonyms for the scientific concept of SPS. By way of definition, Aron and Aron (1997) wrote that
sensory processing here refers not to the sense organs themselves, but to what occurs as
sensory information is transmitted to or processed in the brain. They assert that the trait is not a disorder but an innate
survival strategy that has both advantages and disadvantages. Elaine Aron's
academic journal articles as well as
self-help publications for the lay reader have focused on distinguishing high SPS from socially
reticent behavior and disorders with which high SPS can be confused; overcoming the social unacceptability that can cause low
self-esteem; and emphasizing the advantages of high SPS to balance the disadvantages emphasized by others. In 2015, journalist Elizabeth Bernstein wrote in
The Wall Street Journal that HSPs were "having a moment," noting that several hundred research studies had been conducted on topics related to HSPs' high sensitivity. The First International Scientific Conference on High Sensitivity or Sensory Processing Sensitivity was held at the
Vrije Universiteit Brussel. By 2015, more than a million copies of
The Highly Sensitive Person had been sold.
Earlier research Research pre-dating the Arons' coining of the term "high sensitivity" includes that of German medicine professor Wolfgang Klages, who argued in the 1970s that the phenomenon of sensitive and highly sensitive humans is "biologically anchored" and that the "
stimulus threshold of the
thalamus" is much lower in these persons. As a result, said Klages, there is a higher permeability for incoming
signals from
afferent nerve fibers so that they pass "unfiltered" to the
cerebral cortex. The Arons (1997) recognized psychologist
Albert Mehrabian's (1976, 1980, 1991) concept of filtering the "irrelevant", but wrote that the concept implied that the inability of HSPs' (Mehrabian's "low screeners") to filter out what is irrelevant would imply that what is relevant is determined from the perspective of non-HSPs ("high screeners"). ==Attributes, characteristics and prevalence==