Sophie Weyn

Sofie Weyn is an advanced postdoctoral researcher in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychologyat the University of Bern (Switzerland) and an affiliated researcher of the Sensitivity Lab. She is a clinical child and adolescent psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher studying Environmental Sensitivity and its role in mental health and wellbeing across development.

Her research focuses on understanding why some individuals are more vulnerable to adverse environments, yet also benefit more from positive ones. She combines multi-method and longitudinal approaches (e.g., questionnaires, behavioral paradigms, physiological measures, and real-time assessments) to study environmental sensitivity across developmental stages and contexts.

Sofie obtained her PhD in 2022 in School Psychology and Development in Context at KU Leuven (Belgium). During her PhD, she developed an internationally validated measure of environmental sensitivity in youth, the Highly Sensitive Child scale (HSC-21), and contributed to the validation of the Highly Sensitive Child Rating System (HSC-RS). Her work shows that environmental sensitivity can be understood across behavioral, genetic, and physiological levels, contributing to a multi-level conceptualization of the trait.

She then conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Neuropsychology Lab at KU Leuven (2022–2023), where she focused on the neurocognitive and daily-life mechanisms underlying environmental sensitivity using experience sampling methodology and experimental paradigms. She examined fluctuations in environmental sensitivity in daily life across contexts and sensory modalities, how it relates to overstimulation, and how visual attentional processes contribute to these differences.

Her current work extends this research to clinical developmental contexts, investigating when and for whom environmental sensitivity confers risk or resilience in youth mental health, with the aim of informing personalized prevention and intervention.

Her work has received recognition through grants and personal fellowships from the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO), Research Council KU Leuven, the European Association for Developmental Psychology, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Academische Stichting Leuven.

In her free time, Sofie enjoys running, climbing, CrossFit, and spending time in the mountains.