Further, building on previous studies investigating the relationship between sensitivity to weak stimuli and traits associated with overreactivity to strong stimuli (Smith, 1968; Siddle et al., 1969; Edman et al., 1979; Ellermeier et al., 2001) we included a psychophysical measure of perceptual sensitivity in addition to ATQ orienting sensitivity. We chose a measure in the auditory domain because previous studies in this domain yielded mixed conclusions regarding the question whether sensitivity and reactivity arise from the same trait. The inclusion of an objective psychophysical measure is also important because ATQ orienting sensitivity is a rating scale measure of sensitivity to weak stimuli. Rating scale measures may be prone to response bias, which is a “systematic tendency to respond to questionnaire items on some basis other than the specific item content” (Paulhus, 1991, p. 17). There are various types of response biases including social desirability bias, where participants answer in such a way that they give a good impression of themselves regardless of their true characteristics (Furnham and Henderson, 1982; Paulhus, 1991), and extremity bias which is the tendency to give extreme rather than moderate responses (or vice versa) irrespective of the content of the items (Bachman and O’Malley, 1984; Paulhus, 1991; Mõttus et al., 2012). Response bias can impact the magnitude of the means and standard deviations of single scales as well as correlations between scales (Baumgartner and Steenkamp, 2001; Van Vaerenbergh and Thomas, 2013). Including an objective psychophysical measure of sensitivity enabled us to check whether our results could be explained by response bias or not. We used the masked auditory detection threshold for pure tones, which reflects listeners’ ability to detect faint sounds in noise, as an objective indicator of sensitivity. To measure it we used a two-interval forced choice (2IFC) procedure combined with a staircase procedure (García-Pérez, 1998). This procedure is regarded as criterion-free, that is, it measures sensitivity irrespective of the response criterion used by the observer (Green and Swets, 1966; Kingdom and Prins, 2010) and thus has minimized vulnerability to effects of response bias. If self-reported sensitivity truly reflects perceptual sensitivity, it should correlate similarly to the reactivity scales as objectively measured sensitivity does. Figure 2 shows an overview of the relationships we aimed to test in the current study.