Yours is a particularly important article.

Hypervigilance, like all personality or psych traits is always a combination of nature and nurture. There are some people who have been exposed to relatively little trauma but whose temperament is so reactive that they will develop hypervigilance with much less exposure to trauma than others.

To me, true empathy is the accurate perception and absorption of the cares and concerns of others. If every twig snap in the forest signals to you an imminent attack by a tiger, when it is really only a squirrel rummaging around, your smoke detector Is set too high. Your threat assessment is inaccurate. The so-called highly sensitive person (HSP) often overreacts to and misinterprets the affect of others.

I had a GF who was like that. She often thought I was angry at her but it was hardly ever the case. She misperceived and misconstrued my pensive mood about things at work, e.g., as anger at her. This was a problem I was never able to solve. In other words, I could never get her to dial down her smoke detector to a level that would accurately allow her to distinguish between threat or not.

In a society that thrives on euphemism, we often spin our self assessments in a more positive light. Sometimes it means, as you observe, that our interpersonal relations suffer for it as do we by failing to address this smoke detector problem.

HSP / Empath issues are underrecognized and under treated.

Your article heightens the awareness of them and the distinctions between them.