Parental care is one of the strongest predictors of child development (Lionetti, 2014; van der Voort et al., 2014). However, some children seem more affected by the parenting quality they receive than others. A substantial number of studies provide evidence that children with certain temperamental characteristics (e.g. negative emotionality or “difficult temperament”), or specific gene variants (e.g. short allele of the serotonin transporter gene), are more vulnerable to the negative effects of poor parenting (e.g. Kim & Kochanska, 2012). Traditionally, these findings have been informed by the vulnerability-stress model (Sameroff, 1983). Central to this framework is the view that some children, due to an inherent vulnerability, are disproportionally more likely to be negatively affected in their development by adverse rearing environments such as child maltreatment, neglect, or insensitive parenting while not necessarily being different from other children in more benign and supportive conditions. In recent years, new ground-breaking concepts emerged suggesting that more “vulnerable” children may not only be more negatively affected by poor parenting but that they also benefit disproportionately more from the influence of positive rearing environments (Aron et al., 2012). According to this perspective of Differential Susceptibility, children differ in their Environmental Sensitivity with some being generally less and some generally more affected by both negative and positive environmental influence (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Pluess, 2015; Boyce & Ellis, 2005). Furthermore, some theories propose the existence of two sensitivity groups: high (i.e. “Orchids”) and low (i.e. “Dandelions”) sensitive individuals (Ellis & Boyce, 2008). However, this assumption has not yet been tested in empirical studies. In addition, most of this research features individual traits that—while reflecting Environmental Sensitivity to some degree—do not appear to capture the sensitivity construct directly (Slagt et al., 2016).
As part of the EStoParenting project we aimed to develop an observational and objective measure for the assessment of Environmental Sensitivity in preschool children. This measure enables researchers to reliably assess and investigate children’s individual differences in response to the environment and allows practitioners to take sensitivity of a child into account when counselling families on parenting and other issues. Furthermore, Dr. Lionetti and the research team investigated, for the first time, the hypothesised existence of sensitivity groups in the general population drawing on observational and self-reported data and found evidence for three rather than two sensitivity groups.
