Environmental Sensitivity in Adults: Psychometric Properties of the Japanese Version of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale 10-Item Version

Abstract

Environmental Sensitivity, which explains individual differences in the tendency to respond more to both positive and negative environmental influences, can be measured by the self-reported Highly Sensitive Person scale. This paper introduced psychometric properties of a brief Japanese version of a 10-item measure of sensitivity (HSP-J10) developed by four studies involving 2,388 adults. The results showed that (1) the newly created HSP-J10 supported the bifactor structure (i.e., Ease of Excitation, Low Sensory Threshold, Esthetic Sensitivity, plus General Sensitivity factor), (2) the HSP-J10 correlated with but discriminated against other personality traits and affects, (3) it had high temporal stability, and (4) participants who scored higher on the HSP-J10 showed significant increases in positive emotion from before watching a video with positive content to after, while those who scored low showed no significant change in positive emotion. It demonstrated the new scale’s good psychometric properties in that it moderated outcomes as theoretically expected when the environment was experimentally manipulated. The four studies suggested that the newly created HSP-J10 might adequately measure individual differences in adults’ Environmental Sensitivity.

Authors’ contributions

Shuhei Iimura: Conceptualization, Investigation, Data analysis, Writing- Original draft preparation; Kosuke Yano: Investigation, Data analysis, Writing- Original draft preparation. Yukiko Ishii: Investigation, Writing- Original draft preparation.

Availability of data and material

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [S.I], upon reasonable request.

Conflicts of interest

There is no conflict of interest with regard to this manuscript.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/k9jtf/ and https://osf.io/k9jtf/. To obtain the author's disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Notes

1 Originally, the HSP scale was created to measure unidimensionality (Aron & Aron, 1997), and subsequent research has identified three subscales (e.g., Smolewska et al., 2006). Although they do not have a strong theoretical basis, empirical findings suggesting the existence of subscales are beginning to accumulate.

2 Originally, 2,201 Japanese were recruited, but 575 who inappropriately rated items on the Directed Questions Scale (Maniaci & Rogge, 2014), which measures inattentional tendencies, were removed from the study.

3 Since recent existing evidence supports the HSP scale’s bifactor structure in terms of both Environmental Sensitivity Theory and model fit, we also analyzed our data using Bifactor Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (B-ESEM; Morin et al., 2016) to examine whether the data in this study fit. As shown in Supplementary Material Figure S2, our data also showed a high fit to the bifactor structure (χ² = 21.55, df = 11, p = .028, CFI = 1.00, RMSEA = 0.02, SRMR = 0.01).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 19J00270 for the first author (Iimura, S.), 19J20902 for the second author (Yano, K.).