What percentage of people are highly sensitive? HSP group shares in Korean and US studies

The highly sensitive person (HSP) is a concept introduced in research by the psychologists Elaine and Arthur Aron. Researchers call the trait sensory processing sensitivity and describe it as processing stimulation, like sound or light, and subtle changes around you more deeply and in more detail. The mind.io HSP test looks at it in three areas.

The published percentages differ, though. Elaine Aron long put the figure at 15–20% (Aron, 1996), and her HSP site (hsperson.com) now says 20–30%. Recent studies that sorted people into low, medium and high groups found about 30% in the high group, and a study of 1,773 Korean adults found 32.7%.

The numbers differ because sensitivity is not something you either have or lack. Like height, it runs from low to high, so the share depends on where you start calling it high. This guide sets out the figures from each study, the differences by age, why the numbers vary, and what to keep in mind when reading your own result.

For a long time, people talked about two groups: a sensitive minority and everyone else. Lionetti et al. (2018) used latent class analysis on the 27-item HSP Scale (answered from 1 to 7) from 906 psychology undergraduates at Stony Brook University in the US (901 analysed, average age 19.2). Latent class analysis lets the data show how many groups of people with similar answer patterns there are.

The answer was three groups, not two. In the full sample, 30.5% fell into the low-sensitivity group, 40.3% into the medium group and 29.2% into the high-sensitivity group. The abstract swaps the two, giving 29% low and 31% high, and the authors summarise the split as roughly 30%, 40% and 30%. They named the less affected low group dandelions, the medium group tulips and the high group orchids.

The boundaries fell at item means of 3.71 and 4.66. The authors read the trait itself as continuous and close to a normal distribution, with people falling into three clusters along it. In a separate sample, the orchids scored higher in emotional sensitivity (neuroticism) and lower in extraversion, and also reacted more strongly when a task lifted their mood.

Yang and Kwon (2024) gave the same 27-item HSP Scale to 1,773 Korean adults in their 20s to 80s (929 women and 844 men) through a Google Forms survey shared on social media in December 2023. Participants were paid.

Latent class analysis put 22.0% in the low-sensitivity group, 45.3% in the medium group and 32.7% in the high-sensitivity group. Compared with the US students, the low group was smaller and the medium and high groups a little larger. The boundaries fell at item means of 3.81 and 4.73, slightly above the US study’s 3.71 and 4.66.

By age, people in their 20s and 30s split 16.9%, 50.5% and 32.6%, and those in their 40s and 50s 23.8%, 45.0% and 31.2%, so about a third were in the high group in both. People in their 60s to 80s split into two groups only (38.0% and 62.0%), so they cannot be compared directly with the other ages. The authors add that cut-offs may differ with age and culture, and that more surveys are needed.

Pluess et al. (2018), who built the 12-item scale for children and teens, also found three groups among UK children and teens aged 8 to 19 (3,581 across the whole paper). The group analysis used some of those samples, and according to the abstract the low group made up about 25–35%, the medium group 41–47% and the high group 20–35%, depending on the sample.

A study of 928 Polish primary school pupils aged 10 to 14 (Baryła-Matejczuk et al., 2022), by contrast, found the low group largest at 41.8%, with 20.5% in the medium group and 37.7% in the high group. The authors note that this split does not match earlier studies, and point to cultural differences, developmental stage and the scale itself as things to consider.

Son and Kim (2021), who re-validated the Korean version of the scale, sorted 925 Korean adults (53.8% of them university students) into four groups, and the high side came to 25.7%: 22.6% high plus 3.1% that the authors called “healthy high sensitivity”. The 477 in that study were the roughly half of the sample used to check the scale’s structure. According to the table in the Korean adult study (Yang & Kwon, 2024), among 1,257 Japanese university students Yano and Oishi (2023) found 28.0%. The table below shows the four studies whose figures we checked in the original papers (for the UK study, the ranges in its abstract).

1. Where the line is drawn. Latent class analysis looks for natural clusters in the data, and that gave about 30%. If instead you define HSP as scoring at least one standard deviation above the mean, about 16% of a normal distribution sits above the line from the outset. A study of 2,593 Japanese adults in their 20s to 40s (Matsuzawa et al., 2026) used that rule and put 14.0% in the high group.

2. Which scale, and how people answered. Item counts and translations differ, with 27 items for adults, 19 in the Japanese version and 12 for children, and so does the number of answer options, five or seven. In Lionetti et al.’s work, a separate sample that answered on a 5-point scale showed the three groups less clearly.

3. Who was surveyed. Samples range from university students and primary school pupils to adults recruited on social media, and people interested in being an HSP may be more likely to join a voluntary online survey. Several studies also note that the cut-offs may change with age and culture.

So there is no single right answer to exactly what percentage are HSPs. Taken together, the studies support a safer conclusion: high sensitivity is not a rare quirk but a common temperament, found in somewhere between one in five and one in three people.

The mind.io HSP test does not use the research HSP Scale. You answer 18 statements written by mind.io (six in each of three areas) from 1 to 5, and the average is shown on a 0–100 scale. Its ranges, 0–39 “takes things in calmly”, 40–64 “sensitive in some situations” and 65–100 “highly sensitive (HSP traits)”, are reading aids, not the cut-offs from the studies above.

So a score of 65 or more does not mean you are in the “top 30%” or in the same group as the figures above. Read it this way instead: a high score means you see in yourself a strong tendency to take things in deeply. Across the studies, this temperament shows up in somewhere between one in five and one in three people, so it is common; it is not a diagnosis, and not a flaw to fix.

The area scores tell you more than the total. If feeling overwhelmed scored high, the habits in how to cope as a highly sensitive person can help; if you are unsure how it differs from introversion, see highly sensitive person vs introvert. Scores can run high in weeks of poor sleep or heavy stress, so take the test again at a calmer time and compare on My Results.

Q. What percentage of people are HSPs? A. It depends on the definition. Aron has long given 15–20%, and studies that sorted people into three groups found about 30% in the high group. In a study of 1,773 Korean adults it was 32.7%.

Q. Are women more often HSPs than men? A. In a study of 2,593 Japanese adults, 19.0% of women and 8.7% of men scored at least one standard deviation above the mean. Women and men may also answer the same items differently, so this is hard to read as an inborn difference.

Q. Do people become less sensitive with age? A. In the Korean adult study, the high group was 32.6% among people in their 20s and 30s and 31.2% among those in their 40s and 50s, with little difference. People in their 60s to 80s split into two groups only, which makes a direct comparison hard. Note too that it did not follow the same people over time.

Q. Is HSP an illness or a diagnosis? A. No. It is a concept describing temperament, not a diagnosis in the DSM-5 or ICD-11. If you have long had trouble sleeping or daily life feels unmanageable, though, talk to a professional, whatever your temperament.

References: Yang, W., & Kwon, M. (2024), Cut-off scores for sensitivity interpretation of the Korean Highly Sensitive Person Scale, PLoS ONE 19(9), e0309904, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309904; Lionetti, F., Aron, A., Aron, E. N., Burns, G. L., Jagiellowicz, J., & Pluess, M. (2018), Dandelions, tulips and orchids: Evidence for the existence of low-sensitive, medium-sensitive and high-sensitive individuals, Translational Psychiatry 8, 24, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-017-0090-6; Pluess, M., Assary, E., Lionetti, F., Lester, K. J., Krapohl, E., Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (2018), Environmental sensitivity in children: Development of the Highly Sensitive Child Scale and identification of sensitivity groups, Developmental Psychology 54(1), 51-70, https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000406; Baryła-Matejczuk, M., Kata, G., & Poleszak, W. (2022), Environmental sensitivity in young adolescents: The identification of sensitivity groups in a Polish sample, PLoS ONE 17(7), e0271571, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271571; Matsuzawa, A., Sasaki, T., & Shimizu, E. (2026), Relationships among highly sensitive personality (HSP), neuroticism, mental health, neurodevelopmental traits, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), PCN Reports 5(1), https://doi.org/10.1002/pcn5.70322; Yano, K., & Oishi, K. (2023), Replication of the three sensitivity groups and investigation of their characteristics in Japanese samples, Current Psychology 42, 1371-1380, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01537-6 (figures as cited in Yang & Kwon, 2024, Table 1); Son, O.-S., & Kim, J. (2021), Revalidation of the Korean version of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (K-HSPS-18) (in Korean), The Korean Journal of Counseling and Psychotherapy 33(3), 1049-1075, https://doi.org/10.23844/kjcp.2021.08.33.3.1049; Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (1997), Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73(2), 345-368, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.73.2.345; Aron, E. N. (1996), The Highly Sensitive Person, Broadway Books; Aron, E. N., The Highly Sensitive Person, https://hsperson.com/.