New research out of Brock University’s Water Resilience Lab is shedding light on the ways in which highly sensitive people (HSP) experience nature.

“HSPs are really interesting, because a lot of people who are highly sensitive don’t know that they are — it’s around 20 to 30 per cent of the population,” says postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Holzer, lead author on the first paper examining this group in the context of sustainability. “They also cross-cut all aspects of society among really diverse groups, so rather than thinking about gender or political categories and dividing people up that way when looking at their connection to nature, this is an identifying trait that cuts across many other categories.”

The paper, “People with sensory processing sensitivity connect strongly to nature across five dimensions,” was published earlier this month in Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy by co-authors Holzer, Gillian Dale and lab director Julia Baird, Associate Professor in Brock’s Environmental Sustainability Research Centre and the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies and a Canada Research Chair in Human Dimensions of Water Resources and Water Resilience.

It details a pilot study funded by a Brock University Explore Grant to show how HSPs connect with nature across five areas: material, experiential, cognitive, emotional and philosophical.

What the team found was that the higher a person’s sensitivity, the more strongly they responded to nature in all five areas, whereas less sensitive people had varied, lower levels of connection to nature across the five areas.

“We become more sure of the pattern as sensitivity increases,” says Holzer. “People who are more sensitive are definitely more connected to nature, and as you get to the most sensitive people, they’re by far the most connected to nature. It’s statistically significant.”

Holzer says understanding how various subgroups connect with nature could be leveraged to improve sustainability leadership, and notes that these findings suggest that HSPs may be well suited to the task.

“Determining if highly sensitive people have greater potential for sustainability leadership than middle- or low-sensitivity people would be an asset for society, but we have to test that possibility with more research,” she says. “My hunch is that HSPs who were psychologically well supported as they developed into adulthood might have outsized potential to be sustainability leaders, but it’s hard to measure the kind of complex leadership skill set we’re talking about. We’re going to try and do that and then see how those two things relate.”

Holzer, previously a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ResNet postdoctoral fellow, was recently awarded a Mitacs Elevate Postdoctoral Fellowship for a project entitled, “Human connections to nature in Niagara Peninsula Watershed protected areas,” in partnership with Niagara Parks Commission and Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.

That project will continue the work of finding high-impact leverage points for interventions in support of sustainability by looking at natural area visitors, with a special focus on newcomers to Canada, who are “another diverse and cross-cutting subgroup,” Holzer says.

“The hope for me is that anyone — from the people who develop signage at parks to people who develop policy — could think beyond the general public, which is an amorphous group of very diverse people, and hone in to think about subgroups,” she says. “I would also like in the future to do studies on interventions, even something really simple like different signage, to test how these different interventions affect different subpopulations.”