Sensory processing sensitivity strengthens the relationship between impactful negative work events, hypervigilance, and daily fatigue

In their daily work, employees encounter negative work events that evoke negative emotions and can disrupt functioning. This study investigates how the perceived impact of daily negative work events relates to employees’ daily fatigue, focusing on hypervigilance as a potential cognitive mechanism. Moreover, the study examines whether individual differences in sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), specifically the facet of ease of excitation (EOE), explain variability in these relationships. Drawing on the Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress (CATS) and a vulnerability-based perspective on SPS, it is proposed that individuals high in EOE are especially likely to respond to impactful negative work events with heightened hypervigilance, which may in turn contribute to daily fatigue. The hypotheses were tested in a 10-day diary study with 183 employees, yielding 1,158 daily observations. Multilevel path analyses supported the proposed moderated process: negative work event impact was associated with heightened daily hypervigilance and, in turn, higher fatigue, particularly among individuals high in EOE. Additional analyses showed that the findings were largely robust when including various covariates. Moreover, moderation effects for low sensory threshold (LST), another SPS facet, and neuroticism did not reach statistical significance, although the estimates were similar, suggesting that the specificity of EOE should be interpreted cautiously. Overall, the study advances research on daily work events by addressing the limited literature on hypervigilance as a daily attentional state and by highlighting EOE as a trait that predicts employees’ responses to impactful negative work events.