Dr Jenni Elise Kähkönen

Background: Children differ significantly in their emotion recognition, which represents an important component of social competence. According to theory and initial empirical studies in adults, individual differences in the trait of environmental sensitivity have been associated with emotion recognition, but this has not been studied in highly sensitive children yet. Highly sensitive children are generally understood to perceive and process environmental stimuli, including social ones, more easily and deeply than other children. We hypothesised that highly sensitive children would perform better in an objective emotion recognition task and be rated as more socially competent compared to low sensitive children. Methods: Ninety-seven 7–9-yearold UK primary school children (47% girls) completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test’s child version (RMET-C) on a computer one-on-one with a researcher during school hours on school premises. Teachers rated children’s sensitivity using the Highly Sensitive Child in School scale and also reported on children’s social competence. Children completed the Highly Sensitive Child scale. The data was collected in 2022. Results: Teacher-reported sensitivity emerged as a significant predictor of RMET-C and social competence, while child-reported sensitivity was not associated with emotion recognition. Teacher-reported overstimulation of children was negatively associated with social competence. Conclusions: This study is the first to report links between children’s environmental sensitivity, emotion recognition skills, and social competence. Findings are consistent with theories on environmental sensitivity and highlight the potential benefits of high sensitivity but will need to be replicated in more ethnically diverse samples.

A growing body of literature suggests that specific markers of relationship quality are meaningfully linked to health outcomes. We tested whether relational self-expansion potential might be one of these markers in cross-sectional samples of individuals and romantic couples. Study 1 found that greater self-expansion potential was linked to better perceived physical health via both higher positive affect (PA) and lower negative affect (NA). Study 2 replicated these findings for PA (but not NA) and revealed both actor and partner effects of self-expansion potential. Results remained robust when statistically accounting for gender, age, body mass index, agreeableness, neuroticism, and perceived partner responsiveness. These findings identify a new relationship-level "active ingredient" associated with health and have implications for future physical health studies.

Social interactions can be stressful, especially if they involve provocation or ambiguity. At the same time, such interactions necessitate social cognition. The question thus arises how stress affects social cognition and how personality attributes modulate this effect. The aim of the current study was to investigate the link between emotional reactivity, physical exercise, and social cognition under stress. As a measure of social cognition, we used spontaneous perspective taking, i.e., the degree to which participants represented the mental state of another agent. Studying young female participants, we investigated how physiological regulation, measured through resting heart-rate variability, is related to spontaneous social perspective taking under stress, and to predicted anger in an ambiguous social scenario. When controlling for resting heart rate, vagally mediated heart-rate variability was negatively correlated with the effect of stress on perspective taking, indicating that good physiological regulation supports social cognition under stress. Further, participants who reported to exercise at least once a week showed higher perspective taking under stress than less active participants. Finally, we found tentative evidence for participants who exercised regularly to show reduced predicted anger in response to an ambiguous provocation. Our findings suggest that good physiological regulation and regular physical exercise support social cognition under stress.

Around a third of children perceive and process their environment more deeply and are more impacted by its quality. To obtain a more comprehensive and objective measure of this Environmental Sensitivity (ES) in primary school children, we developed a semi-structured, multi-informant interview. Study 1 captures the item development while Study 2 covers the psychometric analysis and initial validation of the interview in a small pilot sample of 61 parents, their 60 children, and nine teachers, recruited from a longitudinal study involving 7–9-year-old second-graders in Swiss primary schools. Method: Interviews were conducted by trained psychologists with expertise in ES. Questionnaire data was collected from parents, children, and teachers. Findings: Parent and child interviews had good internal consistency (α = 0.83, α = 0.79, respectively) and correlated highly with each other (r = 0.535). Parent-interview correlated well with the validated sensitivity questionnaire (r = 0.514). Teacher interviews diverged from parent and child views and may inform about differences in how sensitivity is reflected across contexts. Conclusions: The new Highly Sensitive Child Interview (HSC – I) is a promising tool for a comprehensive and reliable assessment of sensitivity in primary school children and will be of value to educational psychologists following larger-scale validation. Declarations of Interest: None. •Highly sensitive children process their environment more deeply.•We present a new multi-informant interview of children's environmental sensitivity.•Parent and child interviews are characterized by good psychometric properties.•Parent and child interviews have a strong agreement between them.•The interview correlates with existing sensitivity measures.