Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity: How to manage intense emotions as a highly sensitive person - learn more about yourself with this life-changing self help book

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Nevertheless, a few studies that assessed the identification of lower intensity emotion expressions in children offer more nuanced comprehension of developmental trends of emotion recognition abilities during childhood. The sensitivity to a more subtle intensity of emotion expressions could help children to infer others’ feelings more precisely, which could be predictive of success in encoding emotion information [ 2, 15, 16]. We all are continuously evolving and growing, so I reserve the right to change my mind and have to stay open to where my intuition leads. Frijda, N. H., Mesquita, B., Sonnemans, J., & van Goozen, S. (1991). The duration of affective phenomena or emotions, sentiments and passions. In K. T. Strongman (Ed.), International review of studies on emotion (pp. 187–225). Chichester: Wiley.

The factor scores did not differentiate between interoceptive sensibility and emotional conceptualization scales. Instead, they revealed overlapping variance between measures of both components. Factor 1 mostly comprised scales measuring sensibility toward perceiving physiological changes and emotion and was named “ Sensibility.” Factor 2 consisted of scales that are related to perceptions about attentional resources devoted to physiological and emotional aspects and was labeled “ Monitoring.” Table 2 shows the loading scores from each of the scales. Relation Between Principal Component Analysis Factors and Emotional Intensity and Granularity Emotion Differentiation (ED) Task Waugh, C. E., Hamilton, J. P., & Gotlib, I. H. (2010). The neural temporal dynamics of the intensity of emotional experience. NeuroImage, 49(2), 1699–1707. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.10.006. She has appeared in major publications such as The Psychologies Magazine, Marie Claire, The Daily Mail, Huffpost, and The Telegraph. She also publishes regularly in Psychology Today. Schupp, H. T., Cuthbert, B. N., Bradley, M. M., Cacioppo, J. T., Ito, T., & Lang, P. J. (2000). Affective picture processing: The late positive potential is modulated by motivational relevance. Psychophysiology, 37(2), 257–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8986.3720257. Imi Lo is a consultant, psychotherapist, and published author with extensive and international experience in psychotherapy and mental health. Her books Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity and The Gift of Intensity are available worldwide and in multiple languages .Emotional intensity is not an illness or a problem to be solved, but a unique personal trait, a gift in its own right. This book is for you if: Greenwald, M. K., Cook, E. W., & Lang, P. J. (1989). Affective judgment and psychophysiological response: Dimensional covariation in the evaluation of pictorial stimuli. Journal of Psychophysiology, 3, 51–64.

Roccas, S., Klar, Y., & Liviatan, I. (2006). The paradox of group-based guilt: Modes of national identification, conflict vehemence, and reactions to the in-group’s moral violations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 698–711. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.698. Fujita, F., Diener, E., & Sandvik, E. (1991). Gender differences in negative affect and well-being: The case for emotional intensity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(3), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.3.427.

Small, D. M., Gregory, M. D., Mak, Y. E., Gitelman, D., Mesulam, M. M., & Parrish, T. (2003). Dissociation of neural representation of intensity and affective valuation in human gustation. Neuron, 39(4), 701–711. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0896-6273(03)00467-7. In the current study, we assessed interoceptive processing using self-report measures. To gain more insights into the role of other facets of interoception in the emotional experience, future studies could use measures such as the Heartbeat counting task, the Whitehead heartbeat detection task, or heart-evoked potentials, which are more closely related to interoceptive accuracy ( Critchley and Garfinkel, 2017). Although both factors showed significant correlations with the adaptability and well-being scales, in general, Sensibility showed larger correlations than Monitoring, indicating that Sensibility and Monitoring contribute differently to these scales. Discussion

Emotional intensity was taken as the intensity of the emotional word with the highest rating for each trial, which was averaged across trials. Emotional arousal was extracted by averaging the experienced arousal across trials in the ED task. Because intensity and arousal scores were negatively skewed ( skewness>−0.79), they were normalized using the following formula: sqrt(max(S + 1) – S), where S refers to the mean intensity/arousal scores. Normal distribution was achieved after applying this transformation (0.06 < skewness< 0.09). The ability to attribute low intensity emotional expressions mediates, in a complementary manner, the relationship between age and the global emotion expression score. To investigate the relationship between interoception and emotional conceptualization questionnaires, Pearson’s correlation analyses were performed. Thereafter, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed to extract the factors underlying the questionnaire scores. Initially, a PCA with varimax rotation (i.e., to maximize simple structure) was performed to identify the number of relevant underlying factors.She specializes in working with highly sensitive, intense, and gifted individuals . Her books Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity and The Gift of Intensity are available worldwide and in multiple languages. Like with confusion about internal states, individuals recounted how this perception of invalidation would lead to feelings of alienation. For example, when asked how ES “felt” for them, one participant said “you’re kinda sitting there thinking to yourself, why am I feeling this, when other people wouldn’t feel this bad”. For another, his emotional differences lead others to the conclusion that he was immature, incapable or un-intelligent – setting him apart from others. You have a sense that you are not reaching your full potential, and you are ready for your unique gifts and creative calling. The Monitoring factor reflects a general tendency to devote attentional resources to the internal physiological and emotional states of an individual. The role of selective and executive attention is crucial in the construction and experience of emotions ( Barrett, 2017a; Smith et al., 2019). Which aspect of the ongoing processing the attention is deployed to, e.g., either to the bodily changes, or the surrounding environment, may have a strong influence on the interpretation of the current state of an individual ( Barrett et al., 2004).