Sensory Processing Sensitivity and the Subjective Experience of Parenting: An Exploratory Study

• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Date: 01 October 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12370
• Author: Arthur Aron,Shelly Zhou,Elaine N. Aron,Natalie Nardone

E N. A  A A Stony Brook University

N N University of California San Francisco

S Z University of Toronto

Sensory Processing Sensitivity and the Subjective

Experience of Parenting: An Exploratory Study

Objective: To explore the relationship between

sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) and

parental subjective experience (PSE).

Background: SPS is a temperament trait char-

acterized by greater sensitivity to environmen-

tal and social stimuli; no previous research has

examined the relation of SPS to PSE (e.g., how

much parents feel parenting is difcult or feel

connected to their child).

Method: In the rst of two online studies,

mothers were unaware of the study’s rela-

tion to SPS (N=92). In the second, mothers

(n=802) and fathers (n=65) were recruited

through an SPS-related website. SPS was

assessed by the short version of the Highly

Sensitive Person Scale; PSE by 27 items with

three components—Parenting Difculties, Good

Coparenting Relationship, and Attunement to

Child.

Results: Controlling or not for external stres-

sors, negative affectivi ty, children’s age, and

socioeconomic status, high-SPS mothers in both

studies scored meaningfully higher on Parenting

Difculties and Attunement to Child; high-SPS

fathers scored higher on Attunement to Child.

Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony

Brook, NY 11794-2500 (arthur.aron@sunysb.edu).

Key Words: sensory processing sensitivity, Highly Sensitive

PersonScale, experience of parenting, parenting difculties,

parent’s attunement to child.

SPS had little association with Coparenting

Relationship.

Conclusion: Parents high in SPS report more

attunement with child, although mothers found

parenting more difcult.

Implications: This information could aid fam-

ily researchers, particularly by considering the

role of adult temperament. It also suggests that

interventions focused on high-SPS parents could

improve their parenting experience and hence

perhaps enhance child development. Thus, this

research and what may follow from it could

advance both theory and practice.

Research on the association of parent’s person-

ality or temperament traits with various par-

enting behaviors and child outcomes (parenting

style, quality of parent–child dyad, child func-

tioning, etc.) continues to grow. However, little

research on parental personality or temperament

has looked at its relationship with parental sub-

jective experience (PSE; e.g., how difcult par-

enting is for them, how connected they feel to

their children, how parenting affects their rela-

tionship with the coparent), which is important

to understand because PSE plays a major role in

parents’ quality of life (e.g., Nelson, Kushlev,&

Lyubomirsky, 2014) and has a potentially impor-

tant role in shaping their parenting behaviors and

child outcomes as well.

In this article, we also look at the associa-

tion of PSE with parents’ traits in a largely new

420 Family Relations 68 (October 2019): 420–435

DOI:10.1111/fare.12370

SPS and the Experience of Parenting 421

way, focusing on the relation of PSE to sen-

sory processing sensitivity (SPS; E. N. Aron &

Aron, 1997; E. N. Aron, Aron, & Jagiellowicz,

2012). SPS theory has concentrated on the high

end (20%–30% of humans; e.g., Lionetti et al.,

2018) of environmental sensitivity, a necessity

for survival. This sensitivityis largely due to pro-

cessing stimuli more deeply (E. N. Aron et al.,

2012). SPS is particularly well suited to study

the association of a trait with PSE because the

standard measure of SPS—the Highly Sensi-

tive Person (HSP) Scale (E. N. Aron & Aron,

1997)—includes many questions about subjec-

tive experiences likely relevantto PSE (e.g., “Do

you seem to be aware of subtleties in your envi-

ronment?”).

SPS is a well-studied biologically based

temperament trait. Regarding our use of temper-

ament for adults, we realize that it is more often

used to describe traits in children, with person-

ality used to describe traits in adults. However,

it is also frequently explained that adult person-

ality is the sum of learning history and early

appearing, apparently more biologically based

temperament traits (e.g., Gartstein, Putnam,

Aron, & Rothbart, 2016; Rothbart, 2007). High

sensitivity is a contributor to personality and not

simply a personality trait because it creates a dif-

ferential susceptibility (Belsky & Pluess, 2009)

to what is integrated into personality. That is,

those highly sensitive to their environments will

do better than others in a good environment but

do worse than others in a poor environment; both

these effects are especially pronounced during

childhood and are early determinants of some

classic adult personality traits. For example, a

poor childhood contributes to or precedes adult

neuroticism (E. N. Aron, Aron, & Davies, 2005).

Indeed it is common in SPS research (as was

done in the present research) to partial out a mea-

sure of negative affect or neuroticism (except

when studying interactions with childhood envi-

ronment), reducing the overlap with standard

personality measures of these traits. Again,

sensitivity certainly blends with learning his-

tory, positiveor negative, to produce personality

traits, especially neuroticism and negativeaffect,

and thus correlates with personality measures

of these. However, even considering the entire

Big Five, which is often seen as a fairly com-

plete description of adult personality, despite a

moderately high correlation of SPS with its Neu-

roticism measure, the entire Big Five explains

only 29% of the variance on the HSP Scale.

SPS can be understood in terms of four

aspects, all of which could affect PSE: Those

high in SPS appear to process information more

thoroughly; have stronger reactions to emo-

tional stimuli, including greater empathy; show

greater sensitivity to subtle stimuli; and are

more easily overstimulated (for a review, see

E. N. Aron et al., 2012). Experimental (e.g.,

Gerstenberg, 2012), functional magnetic reso-

nance imaging (fMRI; e.g., Acevedo Jagiellow-

icz, Aron, Marhenke, & Aron, 2017), genetic

(e.g., Chen et al., 2011), and survey studies (e.g.,

E. N. Aron & Aron, 1997, Study 4) related to

each of these aspects have found substantial dif-

ferences between those high and low on the HSP

Scale, and each of these four aspects would seem

likely to inuence PSE. For example, greater

empathy and noticing subtle stimuli might allow

parents to be unusually aware of their child’s

needs, but being easily overstimulated could

make parenting seem highly unpleasant at times.

To assess PSE, we constructed a brief mea-

sure with a variety of items, based on theory and

anecdotal accounts by parents high in SPS. We

specically constructed items that might reect

an association between SPS and PSE (e.g., “I

worry about my child,” “When something hap-

pens to my child, it is as if it happened to me.”).

Although we had not organized them in any

particular way, a factor analysis of these items

(described in detail in Study 1) indicated they

fell into three clear groups: Parenting Difculties

(likely to be related to the overstimulation aspect

of SPS), Good Coparenting Relationship (possi-

bly also related, negatively, to the overstimula-

tion aspect), and Attunement to Child (related to

depth of processing, empathy, and sensitivity to

subtle stimuli).

In the next section, we briey review four

key topics. We rst present a partial review of

studies in the general parenting literature of the

effect of parents’ personality and temperament

traits on child outcomes (e.g., child’s mental

health, social development). This brief review

highlights both that the focus of these studies

was not PSE and that even using those traits

vaguely related to SPS have not come close

to measuring high sensitivity. Second, we turn

to prior research on the relation of high sen-

sitivity in general (more related to the sub-

ject of this article but not specically studying

SPS) to parenting in general (not specically

PSE). Third, we briey review past research

on SPS, relating it to the PSE factors that we