Depression as a mediator between sensory processing sensitivity and prefrontal symptoms in Spanish adults

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is an innate personality trait that describes how individuals perceive and capture environmental information. The extensive literature suggests that people high in SPS may present health implications, such as depressive symptoms and prefrontal symptoms. Prefrontal symptoms are related to executive functioning, especially to emotional, social, behavior control problems such as decision making or planification/organization problems, impulsivity, working memory difficulties. We recruited eight hundred Spanish adults ( M = 26.66 years old, SD = 12.24) and completed the self-administer questionnaires on SPS, depression, and prefrontal symptoms. This study performed correlation and mediational analyses. Our results indicated positive associations of the depression variable with emotional ( r = 0.481, p < 0.001) and behavioral ( r = 0.534, p < 0.001) control problems, and also with prefrontal symptoms as a general factor ( r = 0.572, p < 0.001), and SPS ( r = 0.201, p < 0.001). SPS was also positively correlated with emotional ( r = 0.354, p < 0.001), behavioral ( r = 0.276, p < 0.001) control problems, and prefrontal symptoms as a general factor ( r = 0.303, p < 0.001). Depression also showed a partial mediation between SPS and both emotional (R 2 = 0.38, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.078, 0.142]) and behavioral (R 2 = 0.339, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.097, 0.168]) control problems. Depression seems to mediate the relationship between SPS and prefrontal symptoms, being highly sensitive individuals with a tendency to depressive symptoms and problems related to emotional, social, and behavioral control.

May support depression screening in high-SPS adults with control issues; hypothesis-generating and leaves causal pathways open.