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Highly Sensitive People’s Moods May Follow Safety, Not Scenery
In A Nutshell
- Higher scorers on a popular sensitivity quiz had bigger mood swings tied to street safety, tidiness, and friendly company.
- Heat, smells, noise, and park features did not affect their moods more than anyone else’s.
- The quiz may also capture general emotional distress, and the effects were modest.
- Self-reported moods from Chicago residents show links, not cause and effect.
Highly sensitive people are often described as living with the volume turned up, as if every sound and feeling arrives stronger than it does for everyone else. A Chicago study found that picture incomplete. Among people who score high on a widely used sensitivity quiz, mood followed how safe, tidy, and friendly a spot felt more closely than it did for other people, while air quality, temperature, and noise made no extra difference.
Environmental sensitivity, often called being highly sensitive, is a personality trait in which people notice more, process what they notice more thoroughly, and react more strongly to their surroundings. In a study of nearly 2,900 teenage twins, genes appeared to explain close to half of the variation in sensitivity, and other work links high scores to more stress, anxiety, and depression. The Chicago study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, tested whether that stronger reaction extends to everyday surroundings, and the trait’s name fit only part of what the data showed.
For high scorers, safety worked like a gauge for mood. On ordinary city streets, their good moods climbed more than other participants’ did when a spot felt safer than usual, and their bad moods rose more when it felt less safe. Lead author Kim Meidenbauer, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington State University, offered a short summary: “It seems like it’s more about social environments than the physical environment.”
Highly Sensitive People’s Moods Were More Tied to Street Safety and Order
Data came from a project called Mapping Chicago, which recruited 426 adult residents, mostly through Facebook ads, plus Craigslist and Chicago-focused Reddit forums. Of those, 364 completed at least one survey about an ordinary outdoor spot and 303 completed at least one about a city park, adding up to more than 3,800 surveys.
Ages ran from 18 to 73, averaging about 36. The group included 274 women, 104 men, and 13 people who identified as nonbinary or gender nonconforming. By race and ethnicity, 183 participants identified as White, 105 as Black, 64 as Asian, and 58 as Hispanic or Latino.
Everyone first completed a starting survey that included the 27-question sensitivity quiz, formally called the Highly Sensitive Person Scale. It scores three traits: how easily a person gets mentally overwhelmed, how strongly they appreciate beauty and fine details, and how unpleasant even fairly weak sensory input feels. Over two weeks, participants then used a phone app to fill out short surveys at spots around the city, five to 10 at ordinary outdoor locations and three to five in parks. At each stop, they rated how safe, orderly, noisy, and clean the air felt, estimated how many people were nearby, and noted whether those people were getting along. Then they reported their mood.
Analysts compared each person only with themselves. The question was how one person’s mood differed between a block that felt uneasy and a block that felt calm, or between a messy stop and a tidy one.
Tidiness and company counted too. A tidier-than-usual spot came with bigger gains in positive mood for sensitive participants, and a more disorderly one with bigger jumps in negative mood. More people nearby, and friendly interactions among them, also went with bigger boosts in positive mood.
Heat, Smells, and Noise Did Not Affect Highly Sensitive People More
Physical surroundings made no such difference, whether the measure was smell, air cleanliness, comfortable temperature, or noise. In parks, no clear differences appeared for any feature tested, including naturalness, cleanliness, and upkeep.
Meidenbauer’s team offers a possible reason that safety and order mattered while air and heat did not. They point to earlier research showing that visual mess signals that a place is neglected, which raises fear of crime. In their reading, a block strewn with litter or marked with graffiti might work as a warning about other people. A crowd, meanwhile, may feel reassuring because more people can mean more “eyes on the street.”
The Sensitivity Quiz May Capture Broader Emotional Vulnerability
Scores on the quiz’s three parts did not behave alike. The overwhelm and sensory-discomfort parts produced nearly the same pattern as the total score, and higher scores on either came with gloomier moods overall. The authors cautioned that the quiz may be picking up more than sensitivity to surroundings, such as a general tendency toward emotional distress. Appreciation of beauty showed no link to the safety, order, or social findings.
Effects were modest in magnitude, the authors noted. Meidenbauer cautioned that sensitive people could still react more strongly in truly extreme situations, like a dangerous heat wave or heavy air pollution, which the findings do not rule out. Her lab is now looking into other reasons people react differently to the same surroundings, including additional personality traits and whether a person likes heat or cold.
At least by this measure, being highly sensitive does not appear to crank up every experience equally. Whether making blocks feel safer and friendlier would lift moods remains untested, but the findings give residents and city planners a more specific place to look than air and noise.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes one published study and is intended for general informational purposes only. It is not medical, psychological, or professional advice. Anyone concerned about their own mental health should consult a qualified health professional.
Paper Notes
Study Limitations
This study found links, not proof of cause, so it cannot show that safety, order, or crowds changed anyone’s mood. Participants rated their own surroundings and moods, with no outside measurements of actual conditions, which leaves open whether sensitivity changes how people feel in a place, how they judge it, or both. Participants also chose when and where to complete surveys as they went about daily life, so their moods or routines may have steered which places they rated. All participants lived in one large U.S. city, and the sample leaned female, which limits how far results extend to other places and groups. Mood came from self-reports only, with no stress hormones or other body measures. The park samples were smaller, making real effects harder to spot there, so the absence of park findings does not show that sensitivity is irrelevant in parks. The beauty-appreciation part of the scale also produced less consistent answers across its questions than the other two parts. Finally, the significant effects were modest, and the authors called for repeating the work with larger samples and more surveys per person.
Funding and Disclosures
National Science Foundation grants to Kimberly L. Meidenbauer (NSF SAI 2324642) and Marc G. Berman (NSF S&CC-1952050) supported the work. The authors reported no competing interests. The analysis plan was filed publicly on the Open Science Framework before the researchers examined the data, and the data and analysis code are publicly available.
Publication Details
Paper title: “Sensitive to what? Environmental sensitivity moderates affective associations with perceived safety, order, and social context.” Authors: Kimberly L. Meidenbauer (Department of Psychology, Washington State University, corresponding author), Sepehr Pourkhalili (University of Guilan, Iran), Kathryn E. Schertz (University of Michigan and Michigan State University), Elizabeth A. Janey (University of Chicago), and Marc G. Berman (University of Chicago). Meidenbauer and Pourkhalili contributed equally. Journal: Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 115 (2026), Article 103229, published by Elsevier. Received February 18, 2026; accepted September 25, 2026; available online September 29, 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103229. Data and code: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Q6TMW. Preregistration: https://osf.io/9kv5a. The twin-study figure, Meidenbauer’s comments, the litter-and-graffiti example, and the description of her lab’s follow-up work come from a Washington State University news release, not from the paper.
