Me who am as a nerve o’er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth…

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Julian and Maddalo

Fiver: ‘There isn’t any danger here at the moment. But it’s coming – it’s coming. Oh, Hazel, look! The field! It’s covered with blood!’

Richard Adams: Watership Down

The trouble with a 2000-word article, which is the most you can really expect someone to read in passing, is that you have to miss stuff out. There’s been some interest in my piece on the creative personality, and it’s been preying on my mind that there is so much more to say.

The ‘Highly Sensitive Person’

So, do any of these statements resonate with you?

I seem to be aware of subtleties in my environment

Other people’s moods affect me

I am easily overwhelmed by things like bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics or sirens close by

I have a rich, complex inner life

I startle easily

I become unpleasantly aroused when a lot is going on round me

I notice and enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, works of art

I get rattled when I have a lot to do in a short amount of time

I make it a point to avoid violent movies and tv shows

Changes in my life shake me up

When I was a child, my parents or teachers seemed to see me as sensitive or shy

These are extracts from a questionnaire to establish whether you are a ‘Highly Sensitive Person’ (HSP), a construct put forward by the psychologists Elaine and Eric Aron in the 1990s, and developed in Elaine Aron’s book, The Highly Sensitive Person. You will see that there’s a lot of overlap with the description of the creative personality in my last article and the traits of Openness, Introversion and Emotional Instability. We also saw that creative people find it more difficult to screen out distractions. If you are creative, or you work with creatives, you or they may well be HSPs.

The phenomenon was first noticed in children by the psychologist, Jerome Kagan, who found that 20% of his sample of four-month-olds reacted much more strongly – by moving their bodies and crying – to unexpected or unfamiliar events. ‘High reactives’, as he called this group, displayed cautious and avoidant behaviour when faced with these stimuli, while ‘low reactives’ were more spontaneous and ready to interact with them. Kagan concluded that the differences were due to neurophysiological differences in perceptual processing, and in the excitability of the amygdala, the organ in the brain which triggers our fight or flight response.

Elaine Aron reframed ‘high reactivity’ as ‘Sensory Processing Sensitivity’. She conducted a study of people who self- reported that they were HSPs which produced some new insights. HSPs often describe themselves as creative or intuitive, and love the arts and nature. They process information about their environments, physical and emotional, unusually deeply. Their intuition is highly honed because of their propensity to notice subtleties others do not; this combined with the active amygdala makes them particularly alert to future hazards. And many of the cues they notice relate to their own and other people’s emotions. They are empaths. They are also conscientious and scrupulous about their own behaviour.

Aron suggests that the difference in sensitivity is largely inherited (we’ll come on to the relationship between nature and nurture in determining personality in future articles) and has also been observed in other mammals, again at a level of about 20% of the sample. One of my maine coon cats – normally a rugged and outgoing breed - definitely falls into this group. Though he has lived with us in perfect peace for twelve years, he still takes cover under the table if my husband, who is tall, approaches him too quickly. Aron also suggests that it is of evolutionary advantage to have a proportion of any group who are hyper-alert to the environment because they can warn the others (often unnecessarily of course) of possible risks. The relevant cat showed these traits even as a tiny kitten. We called him Fiver because that is the role of the timid but visionary rabbit in Watership Down, quoted above.

Though being an HSP has the advantages described, it’s clear that working life is likely be particularly challenging for them. They find bright lights, noisy environments, lots of social interaction, multi-tasking, tight deadlines and sudden changes of direction – this could almost be a definition of organisational life - draining to the point of frazzling. If, therefore, you are one, or work with them, and I have encountered many among my creative clients, it is as well to try to provide the conditions in which your or their talents can flourish, allowing them the downtime to process and recharge and being sensitive to their inability to work in over-stimulating conditions. If they have not been ‘diagnosed’ they can often feel that they are lacking in some way, because they find it difficult to tolerate the conditions and pressures which their more robust colleagues take in their stride.

My favourite anecdote about a creative HSP, doesn’t, however relate to the office but to the budget hotels in which we often have to stay on business. She said she always had to take her own sheets with her because she couldn’t bear the harsh texture of the ones provided.

A short digression on psychometrics

I’m conscious that I’ve mentioned three different models of personality, psychometrics, in these articles: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, the ‘Big 5’, and now the HSP. It seems appropriate therefore to pause for a moment to focus on them (I will look at them in much more detail in later articles). I’ve found psychometrics extremely useful in my coaching practice, where I’ve used the MBTI extensively, and also in wider life.

Having access to a simple model of the differences between individuals, and a common language to describe them, enables us to understand, and hence accept, ourselves and others. I vividly remember discovering my MBTI Type for the first time (INTJ, for those who speak MBTI) and the comforting realisation that I wasn’t as weird as I thought– or was at least weird in the same way as a lot of other people. The same applies even more strongly to people with apparently disabling quirks like HSPs (I’m also one of these; people comment that I seem to live at home in semi-darkness). Doing a psychometric as a team can be invaluable in helping the members work together - extravert with introvert, visionary with engineer – and provides a language to talk about difference in a constructive, non-confrontational way.

The MBTI and the Big 5 have been extensively tested and found reliably to measure what they say they measure, and to predict occupational choice, cognitive and communication style. They are derived in completely different ways but measure roughly the same things (though only the Big 5 ventures into the realm of emotional stability). So, I am a real fan of them. But they are still quite crude, and that is why we have this welter of overlapping but slightly different concepts to wrestle with. The neuroscience of personality is in its infancy, and we won’t have a definitive way of measuring individual differences until we know more about how the physiology of the brain determines personality and how nurture interacts with it – which of course we may never fully understand.

Empathy

‘ The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours’

Alan Bennett: The History Boys

‘ [The author] held my hand all the way. She stretched and tugged at my heart and soul, for sure – but she pulled them into a better shape……….I was different by the end. More than that, I was better. I understood more and it pulled me on the way to empathy.’

Lucy Mangan on reading Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian, in Bookworm – a memoir of childhood reading

One of the attributes of HSPs is a high capacity for empathy, and indeed this is true of artistically creative people in general. Empathy is a form of unconscious, intuitive pattern recognition. It involves picking up subtle cues which trigger in you an unconscious simulation of how another person is thinking and feeling, so that you feel their feelings yourself in an attenuated way; you ‘walk in their shoes’. And neuroscientists think that the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) - where we reflect about ourselves and may be where the germs of creative ideas come together (see articles 6 and 7)- also plays a part in empathetic simulation.

Artistically creative people want to express something of their experience of life, a truth about the human condition, and to share it with an audience. One of my producer clients said that she wanted to make TV dramas because she ‘always, from childhood, wanted to step into the story’. Another, who ran an independent cinema, said her motivation when programming was ‘to share transformative experiences’ with her audience.

As the quotation from Alan Bennett suggests, works of art and imagination engage us because they resonate with our experience, often at an unconscious emotional level. The recent drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, about the scandalous treatment of sub-postmasters is a case in point. It resonated powerfully with the audience’s own experiences of injustices and powerlessness and the resultant outcry galvanised the Government into action after many years of inertia.

The quotation from the writer and journalist, Lucy Mangan, illustrates how works of imagination not only resonate with us emotionally but can extend our emotional understanding and range. Empathy is hugely important in forging relationships and reaching collaborative solutions, and this is a very cheering feature of it. Your capacity for empathy is not fixed by nature or early nurture; it can increase over your lifetime. Certain events, such as becoming a parent, act as physiological triggers for such growth. But you can also set out deliberately, thorough experiencing the arts, personal reflection and practice, to hone your empathetic response.

Given the centrality of empathy to much artistic endeavour, there is a possible paradox. The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, cites a study showing that success in the creative arts is correlated with a low score on the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness (high scorers are co-operative, trusting, and empathetic). Artists need to be very single minded to succeed; they are often self-absorbed; and, of course, they may suffer from various forms of emotional instability, which can play out in combative ways in the workplace.

And that is the subject of my next article…

Sources

Elaine N Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person – how to thrive when the world overwhelms you, Thorsons 2017

Isabel Briggs Myers & Peter B Myers Gifts Differing – understanding personality type, Davies-Black Publishing 1995

Daniel Nettle, Personality – what makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007