Quiet (24 page)

But when one of her fellow psychologists casually described Aron as “highly sensitive,” a lightbulb went on in her head. It was as if these two words described her mysterious failing, except that the psychologist hadn't been referring to a flaw at all. It had been a neutral description.

Aron pondered this new insight, and then set out to research this trait called “sensitivity.” She came up mostly dry, so she pored over the vast literature on introversion, which seemed to be intimately related: Kagan's work on high-reactive children, and the long line of experiments on the tendency of introverts to be more sensitive to social and sensory stimulation. These studies gave her glimpses of what she was looking for, but Aron thought that there was a missing piece in the emerging portrait of introverted people.

“The problem for scientists is that we try to observe behavior, and these are things that you cannot observe,” she explains. Scientists can easily report on the behavior of extroverts, who can often be found
laughing, talking, or gesticulating. But “if a person is standing in the corner of a room, you can attribute about fifteen motivations to that person. But you don't really know what's going on inside.”

Yet inner behavior was still behavior, thought Aron, even if it was difficult to catalog. So what
is
the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it? She decided to find out.

First Aron interviewed thirty-nine people who described themselves as being either introverted or easily overwhelmed by stimulation. She asked them about the movies they liked, their first memories, relationships with parents, friendships, love lives, creative activities, philosophical and religious views. Based on these interviews, she created a voluminous questionnaire that she gave to several large groups of people. Then she boiled their responses down to a constellation of twenty-seven attributes. She named the people who embodied these attributes “highly sensitive.”

Some of these twenty-seven attributes were familiar from Kagan and others' work. For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They're often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews).

But there were also new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron's husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty.
They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.

Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.

Recently a group of
scientists at Stony Brook University tested this finding by showing two pairs of photos (of a fence and some bales of
hay) to eighteen people lying inside fMRI machines. In one pair the photos were noticeably different from each other, and in the other pair the difference was much more subtle. For each pair, the scientists asked whether the second photo was the same as the first. They found that sensitive people spent more time than others looking at the photos with the subtle differences. Their brains also showed more activity in regions that help to make associations between those images and other stored information. In other words, the sensitive people were processing the photos at a more elaborate level than their peers, reflecting more on those fenceposts and haystacks.

This study is very new, and its conclusions still need to be replicated and explored in other contexts. But it
echoes Jerome Kagan's findings that high-reactive first graders spend more time than other children comparing choices when they play matching games or reading unfamiliar words. And it suggests, says Jadzia Jagiellowicz, the lead scientist at Stony Brook, that sensitive types think in an unusually complex fashion. It may also help explain why they're so bored by small talk. “
If you're thinking in more complicated ways,” she told me, “then talking about the weather or where you went for the holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality.”

The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're
highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. They avoid violent movies and TV shows; they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. In social settings they often focus on subjects like personal problems, which others consider “too heavy.”

Aron realized that she was on to something big. Many of the characteristics of sensitive people that she'd identified—such as empathy and responsiveness to beauty—were believed by psychologists to be characteristic of other personality traits like “agreeableness” and “openness to experience.” But Aron saw that they were also a fundamental part of sensitivity. Her findings implicitly challenged accepted tenets of personality psychology.

She started publishing her results in academic journals and books,
and speaking publicly about her work. At first this was difficult. Audience members told her that her ideas were fascinating, but that her uncertain delivery was distracting. But Aron had a great desire to get her message out. She persevered, and learned to speak like the authority she was. By the time I saw her at Walker Creek Ranch, she was practiced, crisp, and sure. The only difference between her and your typical speaker was how conscientious she seemed about answering every last audience question. She lingered afterward with the group, even though, as an extreme introvert, she must have been itching to get home.

Aron's description of highly sensitive people sounds as if she's talking about Eleanor Roosevelt herself. Indeed, in the years since Aron first published her findings, scientists have found that when you put people whose genetic profiles have been
tentatively associated with sensitivity and introversion (people with the gene variant of 5-HTTLPR that characterized the rhesus monkeys of
chapter 3
) inside an fMRI machine and
show them pictures of scared faces, accident victims, mutilated bodies, and polluted scenery, the amygdala—the part of the brain that plays such an important role in processing emotions—becomes strongly activated. Aron and a team of scientists have also found that when sensitive people see
faces of people experiencing strong feelings, they have more activation than others do in areas of the brain associated with empathy and with trying to control strong emotions.

It's as if, like Eleanor Roosevelt, they can't help but feel what others feel.

In 1921, FDR contracted polio. It was a terrible blow, and he considered retiring to the country to live out his life as an invalid gentleman. But Eleanor kept his contacts with the Democratic Party alive while he recovered, even agreeing to address a party fund-raiser. She was terrified of public speaking, and not much good at it—she had a high-pitched voice and laughed nervously at all the wrong times. But she trained for the event and made her way through the speech.

After that, Eleanor was still unsure of herself, but she began working to fix the social problems she saw all around her. She became a champion of women's issues and forged alliances with other serious-minded people. By 1928, when FDR was elected governor of New York, she was the director of the Bureau of Women's Activities for the Democratic Party and one of the most influential women in American politics. She and Franklin were now a fully functioning partnership of his savoir faire and her social conscience. “I knew about social conditions, perhaps more than he did,” Eleanor recalled with characteristic modesty. “But he knew about government and how you could use government to improve things. And I think we began to get an understanding of teamwork.”

FDR was elected president in 1933. It was the height of the Depression, and Eleanor traveled the country—in a single three-month period she covered 40,000 miles—listening to ordinary people tell their hard-luck stories. People opened up to her in ways they didn't for other powerful figures. She became for Franklin the voice of the dispossessed. When she returned home from her trips, she often told him what she'd seen and pressed him to act. She helped orchestrate government programs for half-starved miners in Appalachia. She urged FDR to include women and African-Americans in his programs to put people back to work. And she helped arrange for Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. “She kept at him on issues which he might, in the rush of things, have wanted to overlook,” the historian Geoff Ward has said. “She kept him to a high standard. Anyone who ever saw her lock eyes with him and say, ‘
Now Franklin, you should
…' never forgot it.”

The shy young woman who'd been terrified of public speaking grew to love public life. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to hold a press conference, address a national convention, write a newspaper column, and appear on talk radio. Later in her career she served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, where she used her unusual brand of political skills and hard-won toughness to help win passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

She never did outgrow her vulnerability; all her life she suffered dark “Griselda moods,” as she called them (named for a princess in a medieval legend who withdrew into silence), and struggled to “develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.” “I think people who are shy remain shy
always, but they learn how to overcome it,” she said. But it was perhaps this sensitivity that made it easy for her to relate to the disenfranchised, and conscientious enough to act on their behalf. FDR, elected at the start of the Depression, is remembered for his compassion. But it was Eleanor who made sure he knew how suffering Americans
felt
.

The connection between sensitivity and conscience has long been observed. Imagine the following experiment, performed by the developmental psychologist Grazyna Kochanska.
A kind woman hands a toy to a toddler, explaining that the child should be very careful because it's one of the woman's favorites. The child solemnly nods assent and begins to play with the toy. Soon afterward, it breaks dramatically in two, having been rigged to do so.

The woman looks upset and cries, “Oh my!” Then she waits to see what the child does next.

Some children, it turns out, feel a lot more guilty about their (supposed) transgression than others. They look away, hug themselves, stammer out confessions, hide their faces. And it's the kids we might call the most sensitive, the most high-reactive, the ones who are likely to be introverts who feel the guiltiest. Being unusually sensitive to all experience, both positive and negative, they seem to feel both the sorrow of the woman whose toy is broken and the anxiety of having done something bad. (In case you're wondering, the woman in the experiments quickly returned to the room with the toy “fixed” and reassurances that the child had done nothing wrong.)

In our culture, guilt is a tainted word, but it's probably one of the building blocks of conscience. The anxiety these highly sensitive toddlers feel upon apparently breaking the toy gives them the motivation to avoid harming someone's plaything the next time. By age four, according to Kochanska, these same kids are less likely than their peers to cheat or break rules,
even when they think they can't be caught
. And by six or seven,
they're more likely to be described by their parents as having high levels of moral traits such as empathy. They also have fewer behavioral problems in general.