Affective Flattening, Indifference Towards Emotions
What would it be like to feel that you are not able to express or experience emotions (affective flattening)? Let’s imagine for a moment that a family member is told that he has won the lottery and you cannot be happy for him. Instead of experiencing joy, you remain impassive, you do not smile, you do not congratulate him, your face does not change. You are cognitively happy for him, but feel, you don’t really feel that joy.
Imagine that a person is fired from his job for a totally unfair reason. This person, instead of experiencing anger or sadness, is unable to feel any of these emotions. The affective flattening is a phenomenon that some people experience when they are unable to feel and express joy, sadness, fear, anger, or any other emotion, when it is justified. The situations above reflect examples of this phenomenon.
Before continuing to describe affective flattening, let’s see what emotions are and what role they play in our lives. Only in this way will we be able to understand how affective flattening can affect a person.
What are emotions and what are they for?
Emotions are reactions that we all experience: joy, sadness, fear, anger … They are known, but they do not stop becoming complex when we stop for a second and analyze them. Although we have all felt anxiety or nervousness, not all of us are aware that a poor regulation of these emotions can lead to a blockage or even illness.
Simplifying a bit, they represent a biological tendency to react in a certain way to certain stimuli, which we bring as standard and which is modeled with learning and the environment in which we find ourselves. Today, most experts agree that there are different responses to emotions.
Said responses or manifestations are as follows: firstly, a neurophysiological response (caused by hormones and neurotransmitters) is produced, which is manifested through another behavioral (such as gestures) and one more, this time cognitive, which is what we makes us aware of what we are feeling. And these last two vary according to the environment and culture of each individual.
The hedonic tone of the emotion, that is, the pleasure we experience or the pleasant or unpleasant sensation, are “the spice of life. ” It is essential for memory, for decision-making, for our judgments and reasoning, for our behavior, our social relationships and our well-being.
This is so because the memories we keep are mostly emotional. We also need emotional stress to make decisions. In fact, we decide many times emotionally. But the most important thing is that emotions prepare us, motivate us and guide us.
Emotion has two components : one is the subjective sensation we feel within ourselves. The other component is the external manifestation of emotion. Sometimes it is possible to separate the two components. For example, an actor can simulate all manifestations of an emotion without actually feeling it.
What are emotions for?
One of the most important functions of emotion is to prepare us for action. It mobilizes the energy necessary to give an effective response depending on the circumstances and directs our behavior towards the desired goal. Each of the emotions indicates and pushes us towards a different type of action.
Emotions also serve a social function. Communicating our state of mind to the people around us facilitates and strengthens the relationship with them. Our emotions act for others as signals. Therefore, they give them clues so that they can adopt the most appropriate attitude and behavior towards us.
Lastly, emotions also serve a motivational function. On the one hand, emotion energizes motivated behavior. For example, anger facilitates defensive reactions, joy interpersonal attraction, surprise attention to novel stimuli, etc.
In addition, they direct behavior, in the sense that they facilitate approaching or avoiding the goal of motivated behavior based on how we feel. It is clear, then, how important it is to express and feel emotions.
What is affective flattening really?
Affective flattening is not a disorder. It is a symptom that alerts us that something is wrong. Thus, we can define affective flattening as a symptom related to the lack of expression and experimentation of emotions. Often times, affective flattening is also called emotional indifference or affective blunting. This is so because the person who suffers from it remains oblivious or indifferent to the emotions of others and even their own.
It must be emphasized that the absence of emotions occurs with both positive and negative emotions. The person is not only unable to experience joy, but also to experience fear, for example. The affective flattening is seldom fully intense. By this I mean that the person who suffers from it can experience emotions in different degrees of intensity, even if only in exceptional situations. Rather, it is a general emotional tone, in which there are very little oscillations.
How is affective flattening related to depression?
People with affective flattening don’t have to be depressed. Depression is associated with apathy and low mood. In this sense, affective flattening should not be confused with the inability to experience pleasure.
On the other hand, the inability to experience pleasure, or anhedonia, is typical of depressive disorders. The depressed person no longer enjoys activities that were previously enjoyable for them. So you stop doing them, and this, in turn, keeps you from feeling better.
People with affective flattening experience emotions in a low intensity, very “light” way, or they do not experience them at all. However, unlike people with depression, this does not cause them any discomfort. They neither feel nor suffer, as they say colloquially.
Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish anhedonia from affective flattening, but it should be noted that both symptoms can occur at the same time in the same person. To distinguish both symptoms, it is good to remember that anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure (a positive emotion). However, affective flattening is the absence of emotions or a diminished expression of them.
Why is affective flattening experienced?
The affective flattening is the symptom or expression of an underlying disease, as we pointed out previously. Therefore, it never occurs in isolation. The affective flattening occurs together with other symptoms to make up a certain disorder or syndrome.
Affective flattening has always been linked to schizophrenia. Within the schizophrenia disorders we can distinguish two large groups of symptoms: positive symptoms and negative symptoms.
Positive symptoms are called those that, making a comparison with someone who is not experiencing these symptoms, represent an excess. The negatives are those that manifest themselves in the form of lack. For example, a hallucination would be an “excess” of perception, while apathy would be a “lack” of motivation.
Well, affective flattening would fall within the group of negative symptoms of schizophrenia. However, it is not only in schizophrenia that affective flattening can appear. Affective flattening can also appear in autism spectrum disorders. People with autism have difficulty living emotions intensely and also expressing them correctly.
In people with some type of dementia, affective flattening can also occur. This is a consequence of the changes that occur at the brain level. As we have seen, affective flattening is part of a larger group of symptoms. Therefore, treating it requires treating the underlying disease or disorder.
Bibliographic references
Díaz Marsá M, Coping with Schizophrenia. Guide for patients and families . Editorial Focus SC 2013.
