"sensory perception sensitivity"

[elainegrey]

wuweibaby posted this week about an article
→ http://news.softpedia.com/news/A-Closer-Look-on-Shyness-and-Introversion-139218.shtml
→ http://www.livescience.com/health/shy-brain-process-information-differently-100405.html
→ university press release
→ Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci (2010); doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq001; First published online: March 4, 2010 (but not in the March issue).

When i read the lede, i was annoyed. My understanding has been that shy ≠ introverted ≠ "highly sensitive." They may be strongly correlated, but they are *different* cognitive and social interactions. I care, because i find all three are part of my experience, but i think of shyness as coming out of the sensitivity. I can't change my sensitivity, but i can manage it, and thus help overcome the shyness.

The lede:

People who are shy or introverted may actually process their world differently than others, leading to differences in how they respond to stimuli, according to Stony Brook researchers and collaborators in China.

Highly sensitive (compared to less highly sensitive) individuals show greater brain activation in visual attention areas of the brain when making judgments of subtle changes in scenes.
About twenty percent of people are born with this “highly sensitive” trait, which may also manifest itself as inhibitedness, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts.

The lede was copied in all the articles, but getting back to the original press release revealed this tidbit:

This difference that was observed between those who were highly sensitive and those who were not held up even when statistically adjusting for any differences in neuroticism and introversion, making these other traits by themselves unlikely reasons for the difference.

So, the researchers distinguish between introversion (a personality trait) and sensitivity (a separate personality trait). Ha.

This exploratory study examined the extent to which individual differences in sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), a temperament/personality trait characterized by social, emotional and physical sensitivity, are associated with neural response in visual areas in response to subtle changes in visual scenes. Sixteen participants completed the Highly Sensitive Person questionnaire, a standard measure of SPS. Subsequently, they were tested on a change detection task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). SPS was associated with significantly greater activation in brain areas involved in high-order visual processing (i.e. right claustrum, left occipitotemporal, bilateral temporal and medial and posterior parietal regions) as well as in the right cerebellum, when detecting minor (vs major) changes in stimuli. These findings remained strong and significant after controlling for neuroticism and introversion, traits that are often correlated with SPS. These results provide the first evidence of neural differences associated with SPS, the first direct support for the sensory aspect of this trait that has been studied primarily for its social and affective implications, and preliminary evidence for heightened sensory processing in individuals high in SPS.