The contribution of environmental sensitivity and attachment on physiological emotional reactivity and regulation in children

According to the concept of Environmental Sensitivity, and as captured by the Sensory Processing Sensitivity trait, highly sensitive individuals perceive and process information, including emotional ones, more deeply than others. These features appear to predict socio-emotional development of more sensitive children, depending however on the type of rearing environment they grow in, in line with the Differential Susceptibility theory. Here we assessed whether individual differences in sensitivity moderate emotion reactivity and regulation in school-aged children (N = 52, Mage = 8.30, SD = 0.64, 32 female, resident in Italy) as a function of their attachment. We measured skin conductance while children viewed emotional video clips under two conditions: baseline and relax, in which children were asked to actively moderate their emotions when viewing the clips. Highly sensitive children did not show stronger reactivity or regulatory efforts compared to low sensitive children. Yet, they reacted more intensely to negative stimuli when attachment security was low, with a moderate effect size. In contrast, only a preliminary trend emerged suggesting increased regulatory efforts in response to negative images when attachment security was high. No relevant effects emerged in response to positive images. Findings suggest that low attachment security may expose more sensitive children to increased vulnerability and physiological stress, whereas more secure attachment relationships may buffer them from such distress.