Highly sensitive person (abbreviated
HSP; sometimes capitalized
Highly Sensitive Person in the popular press) is the psychology
term first popularized in the mid-1990s to denote a person having a high measure of the innate
trait whose scientific name is
sensory processing sensitivity (SPS). Here,
sensory processing refers to what occurs as sensory information is transmitted to or processed in the brain. SPS is measured by the Highly Sensitive People
Scale (HSPS), which can be divided into subscales.