You’re Not Too Much—You’re Just Deeply Tuned
Some people cry during commercials. Others pick up on subtle shifts in a friend’s tone long before anything is said out loud. Some of us walk into a room and immediately feel the emotional temperature change, like we’ve entered into someone else’s storm. It’s not drama, it’s not instability—it’s attunement.
And yet, for those who live with this kind of sensitivity, the world doesn’t always make space for it. Often, it pathologizes it.
I’ve just released a new academic paper that gives this experience a name: high affective sensitivity. It proposes a trait-level psychological model for what it means to feel deeply, differentiate clearly, and perceive emotional nuance with remarkable speed and clarity. It’s not about being reactive or fragile. It’s about living with a perceptual style that orients you toward emotional and symbolic meaning—and knowing how often that style is misunderstood.
The paper is titled High Affective Sensitivity: Proposing a Trait-Level Model of Emotional Granularity and Depth, and it was written for anyone who has ever been told they were too sensitive, too much, too intense—or, just as often, never told anything at all, just quietly misread.
Why This Trait Needed Naming
Psychology has long studied pieces of this experience: affect intensity, emotional reactivity, trait empathy, neuroticism. But those frameworks often divide the experience into fragmented parts, or worse, lump it in with pathology. What’s been missing is a model that brings these domains together—not to dilute them, but to clarify what they point to when integrated.
High affective sensitivity is defined by three core dimensions:
Rapid emotional responsiveness – the swift activation of affective reactions to internal or external stimuli
Emotional granularity – the ability to label, differentiate, and cognitively process emotions with precision and depth
Symbolic and relational attunement – a tendency to derive emotional meaning from social, aesthetic, and environmental cues
This trait is not a disorder. It’s not a deficit. It’s not something that needs fixing. It is a legitimate, measurable individual difference that shapes perception, creativity, empathy, identity formation, and moral reasoning.
And until now, it hasn’t had a name.
The Problem of Misclassification
Too often, individuals with high affective sensitivity are misdiagnosed with mood disorders, mislabeled as unstable, or quietly punished in educational and workplace settings for being "too emotional." In truth, many of these individuals possess extraordinary emotional clarity. They know what they feel, why they feel it, and how it connects to the bigger picture. The trouble isn’t internal—it’s interpersonal. Their depth outpaces the culture’s readiness to receive it.
This misalignment can lead to harmful outcomes: internalized shame, social withdrawal, diagnostic error, and emotional self-silencing. In children, it often shows up as behavior that educators interpret as moodiness or defiance. In adults, it’s more likely to be dismissed as dramatic, reactive, or overly sensitive. In both cases, the misreading hurts.
The paper makes clear: what may look like emotional reactivity from the outside is often internal emotional precision. The distinction matters. And psychology needs language that can hold it.
What It’s Like to Live With It
I wrote this paper not only as a researcher and professor, but as someone who has lived this trait.
Ever since I was a child, I was tuned in—to people’s unspoken emotions, to small relational ruptures, to the mood of a room. I could feel what others didn’t say, and sometimes what they hadn’t even realized yet. I also carried a heightened relationship to symbolic moments—those quiet, poetic flashes of meaning that most people register only as background. For a long time, I thought I was the problem. Or at the very least, that I had to learn how to translate myself into a simpler version of me—one that made other people comfortable.
It wasn’t until years later, in conversation with my students and in revisiting the literature with fresh eyes, that I realized how many people were living some version of the same thing: feeling deeply, knowing clearly, and navigating a world that kept telling them they were imagining it.
This paper is the academic articulation of that experience.
Emotional Depth Is Not Fragility
The core argument of the paper is this: emotional depth is not the same thing as emotional fragility. One is about precision, the other about disorganization. People with high affective sensitivity may feel more, but they also often understand more. They are capable of naming their internal states with incredible specificity: not just “bad,” but “disappointed,” “misaligned,” “grief-tinged with gratitude.” This kind of granularity isn’t a liability. It’s a sign of high emotional intelligence.
In fact, studies show that emotional granularity is linked to better regulation, less rumination, greater psychological flexibility, and stronger interpersonal functioning. So why do we still treat emotional sensitivity as something to outgrow?
That question sits at the center of this work.
Cultural and Clinical Implications
The paper takes on not just the individual experience of sensitivity, but the broader cultural and clinical contexts in which it’s interpreted.
Culturally, we live in a time of emotional flattening. Public life rewards quick reactions, efficiency, and detachment. Emotional restraint is praised as maturity, while visible feeling is often coded as weakness or instability. The result is a culture that has little space for people whose emotional lives don’t fit neatly into the box.
Clinically, we face the consequences of a diagnostic system that emphasizes behavior over structure. A person who cries easily, feels intensely, or struggles with emotional overwhelm may be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, mood instability, or affective dysregulation—without any inquiry into whether their emotional life is actually highly structured, deeply understood, and well-regulated internally. Without tools for assessing emotional granularity and symbolic attunement, we risk mistaking depth for disorder.
This paper offers a corrective lens. It doesn’t argue against diagnosis where appropriate—but it insists on greater precision in how we conceptualize and assess emotional life.
A Trait, Not a Temporary State
One of the most important clarifications in the paper is that high affective sensitivity is not a transient condition. It’s not just a phase, or a product of trauma (though trauma may amplify it). It is a trait—a stable perceptual orientation that shows up early in development and often remains consistent over time.
It’s also not something that can be neatly reduced to existing labels like neuroticism or sensory processing sensitivity. While those constructs overlap, they don’t account for the full picture—particularly not the interpretive clarity, symbolic resonance, and moral complexity that characterize many people with high affective sensitivity.
Naming the trait is the first step. Honoring it is the next.
For the Emotionally Attuned
If you’re someone who has ever felt like your emotional depth was an inconvenience to others, or a puzzle even to yourself—this paper is for you. It is technical in its formulation, yes, but deeply human in its motivation. It puts words to what many people have felt but struggled to explain.
You are not broken. You are not too much. You’re just living in a culture that hasn’t yet learned how to listen to people like you.
What's Next
This paper is part of a larger body of work I’ve been building on emotional precision, identity formation, and the perceptual experiences of emotionally attuned individuals in emotionally indifferent systems. My hope is that it can serve as a foundation for better research, better clinical tools, and better conversations about what it means to feel deeply and clearly in a world that doesn’t always reward that clarity.
You can read the full paper below, and if it resonates—if you see yourself in it—I’d love to hear from you. This isn’t just about theory. It’s about real people, real lives, and the real consequences of being misunderstood.