Sensory-Processing Sensitivity as a Confounder in the Positive Relationship Between Mindful Awareness and Psychological Distress: A Theoretical Review

Mindfulness meditation is credited as a positive driver of promoting psychological well-being and reducing stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms. However, dispositional mindfulness has been somewhat correlated with psychological distress, as awareness has been positively correlated with psychological symptoms and negative affective states in many studies. This counterintuitive phenomenon has been tentatively explained in a variety of ways, including a wrong interpretation of the items of the mindfulness assessment scales in nonmeditators. The most credited explanation is that increasing attention to present-moment experiences would boost affective reaction to negative experiences and therefore exacerbate related psychological symptoms. This hypothesis is unsatisfactory, as there is much contrasting evidence in this regard. Therefore, we propose a new hypothesis: in dispositional studies, the assessment of the awareness skill of mindfulness would be affected by sensory-processing sensitivity, which could be a confounder in its relationship with psychological distress. Sensory-processing sensitivity refers to a temperamental trait characterized by both awareness of sensorial stimulation and reactivity to experience. Thus, highly sensitive persons usually report increased awareness of subtleties in the environment, ease of overstimulation, and increased affective reaction to stimulation. In support of our hypothesis, we showed in particular how the most widely used scale for assessing mindful awareness could be paired with and interpreted as a measure of sensory-processing sensitivity. We then propose a set of testable hypotheses to drive future research on this topic. If supported by future experimental results, our hypothesis would shed new light on the overall field of dispositional mindfulness studies.