Biosociality in Online Interactions: Youths’ Positioning of the Highly Sensitive Person Category

Abstract

This article examines how young people in a Swedish online forum and in blogs engage in discussions of one popularized psychological personality trait, the highly sensitive person (HSP), and how they draw on different positionings in discursive struggles around this category. The material is analysed with concepts from discursive psychology and post-structuralist theory in order to investigate youths’ interactions. The first is a nuanced positioning, from which youths disclose the weaknesses and strengths of being highly sensitive. Some youths become deeply invested in this kind of positioning, hence forming a HSP subjectivity. This can be opposed using contrasting positionings, which objects to norms of biosociality connected to the HSP. Lastly, there are rather distanced and investigative approaches to the HSP category. We conclude that while young people are negotiating the HSP category, they are establishing an epistemological community.