Blunted affect
Encyclopedia
Blunted affect is the scientific term describing a lack of emotion
al reactivity on the part of an individual. It is manifest as a failure to express feelings either verbally or non-verbally, even when talking about issues that would normally be expected to engage the emotions. Expressive gestures are rare and there is little animation in facial expression or in vocal inflection.
Blunt affect 'can be symptomatic of schizophrenia
, depression
, or brain damage'. 'The difference between flat and blunted affect is in degree. A person with flat affect has no or nearly no emotional expression. He or she may not react at all to circumstances that usually evoke strong emotions in others. A person with blunted affect, on the other hand, has a significantly reduced intensity in emotional expression'.
of feelings from events...feelings seem flat instead of being in sharp contact with what is going on'. One study of flat affect in schizophrenia found that 'flat affect was more common in men, and was associated with worse current quality of life' as well as having 'an adverse effect on course of illness'.
The study also reported a 'dissociation between reported experience of emotion and its display' - supporting the suggestion made elsewhere that 'blunted affect, including flattened facial expressiveness and lack of vocal inflection...often disguises an individual's true feelings': thus feelings may merely be unexpressed, rather than totally lacking. On the other hand, 'a lack of emotions which is due not to mere repression
but to a real loss of contact with the objective world gives the observer a specific impression of "queerness"...The remainders of emotions or the substitutes for emotions usually refer to rage and aggressiveness'. In the most extreme cases, there is a complete 'dissociation
from affective states' on the part of the patient: 'not only has he hacked his intellect away from his feelings, but he has smashed his feelings and his capacity for judgment into smithereens'.
R. D. Laing in particular stressed that 'such "clinical" categories as schizoid, autistic, "impoverished" affect...all presuppose that there are reliable, valid impersonal criteria for making attributions about the other person's relation to his actions. There are no such reliable or valid criteria'.
. Veterans of intense combat have been described as having the thousand-yard stare
(or thousand-yard gaze). Some of these veterans suffer from a disorder once referred to as shell shock
and may experience a number of symptoms, including recurring nightmare
s, hypervigilance
, and avoidance of situations that may cause distress.
There are other, less severe '"negative" psychological symptoms long noted in PTSD: anhedonia
(the inability to feel pleasure) and a general emotional numbness': such lesser emotional reactivity is an arguably natural reaction to stress. Those displaying on this end of the spectrum may self-report dissociation
but no psychological distress per se. People diagnosed with this disorder often endure a chronic course of blunted affect with the onset being subtle yet considerable.
. "Restricted" is not as severe as in flattened or blunted affect.
Constricted affect is an affect type that represents mild reduction in the range and intensity of emotional expression. If the client is consistently euphoric and all intensity is congruent but is unaffected by content, this would be still considered constricted to a euphoric affect.
Labile affect refers to the pathological expression of laughter, crying, or smiling. It is also known as "Pseudobulbar Affect", "Emotional Lability", "Pathological Laughter and Crying", or, historically, "Emotional Incontinence". An individual may find themselves laughing uncontrollably at something that is only moderately funny, being unable to stop themselves for several minutes.
Qualities describing the affective response include:
, meaning that they are indicative of a lack of something. There are some other negative symptoms of schizophrenia which include avolition
, alogia
and catatonic behaviour.
Closely related is alexithymia
- a condition describing people who 'lack words for their feelings. Indeed, they seem to lack feelings altogether. although this may actually be because of their inability to express emotion rather than from an absence of emotion altogether'. Alexithymic patients however can provide clues via assessment presentation which may be indicative of emotional arousal.
'If the amygdala
is severed from the rest of the brain, the result is a striking inability to gauge the emotional significance of events; this condition is sometimes called "affective blindness"'.
's pervasive simulacra and flattened affect'.
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
al reactivity on the part of an individual. It is manifest as a failure to express feelings either verbally or non-verbally, even when talking about issues that would normally be expected to engage the emotions. Expressive gestures are rare and there is little animation in facial expression or in vocal inflection.
Blunt affect 'can be symptomatic of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
, depression
Depression (mood)
Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...
, or brain damage'. 'The difference between flat and blunted affect is in degree. A person with flat affect has no or nearly no emotional expression. He or she may not react at all to circumstances that usually evoke strong emotions in others. A person with blunted affect, on the other hand, has a significantly reduced intensity in emotional expression'.
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenics have long been recognized as showing 'flat or inappropriate affect, with splittingSplitting (psychology)
Splitting may mean two things: splitting of the mind, and splitting of mental concepts . The latter is thinking purely in extremes Splitting (also called all-or-nothing thinking in cognitive distortion) may mean two things: splitting of the mind, and splitting of mental concepts (or black and...
of feelings from events...feelings seem flat instead of being in sharp contact with what is going on'. One study of flat affect in schizophrenia found that 'flat affect was more common in men, and was associated with worse current quality of life' as well as having 'an adverse effect on course of illness'.
The study also reported a 'dissociation between reported experience of emotion and its display' - supporting the suggestion made elsewhere that 'blunted affect, including flattened facial expressiveness and lack of vocal inflection...often disguises an individual's true feelings': thus feelings may merely be unexpressed, rather than totally lacking. On the other hand, 'a lack of emotions which is due not to mere repression
Repression
Repression may refer to:* Memory inhibition, the ability to filter irrelevant memories from attempts to recall* Political repression, the oppression or persecution of an individual or group for political reasons* Social repression...
but to a real loss of contact with the objective world gives the observer a specific impression of "queerness"...The remainders of emotions or the substitutes for emotions usually refer to rage and aggressiveness'. In the most extreme cases, there is a complete 'dissociation
Dissociation
Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning. Dissociation is most commonly experienced as a subjective perception of one's consciousness being detached from...
from affective states' on the part of the patient: 'not only has he hacked his intellect away from his feelings, but he has smashed his feelings and his capacity for judgment into smithereens'.
Assessments
In making assessments of such conditions, however, the specialist is cautioned that 'it is important to keep in mind that demonstrative expression can be influenced by cultural differences, medication, or situational factors'; while the layman is warned to beware of applying the criterion lightly to her or 'his friends, otherwise [s]he is likely to make false judgments, in view of the prevalence of schizoid and cyclothymic personalities in our "normal" population, and our [US] tendency to psychological hypochondriasis'.R. D. Laing in particular stressed that 'such "clinical" categories as schizoid, autistic, "impoverished" affect...all presuppose that there are reliable, valid impersonal criteria for making attributions about the other person's relation to his actions. There are no such reliable or valid criteria'.
Stress
Victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome are often said to display blunted affectAffect (psychology)
Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" .The affective domain...
. Veterans of intense combat have been described as having the thousand-yard stare
Thousand-yard stare
The thousand-yard stare or two-thousand-yard stare is a phrase originally coined to describe the limp, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary warrior...
(or thousand-yard gaze). Some of these veterans suffer from a disorder once referred to as shell shock
Shell Shock
Shell Shock, also known as 82nd Marines Attack was a 1964 film by B-movie director John Hayes. The film takes place in Italy during World War II, and tells the story of a sergeant with his group of soldiers....
and may experience a number of symptoms, including recurring nightmare
Nightmare
A nightmare is an unpleasant dream that can cause a strong negative emotional response from the mind, typically fear or horror, but also despair, anxiety and great sadness. The dream may contain situations of danger, discomfort, psychological or physical terror...
s, hypervigilance
Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance is an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hypervigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion. Other symptoms include: abnormally increased arousal, a...
, and avoidance of situations that may cause distress.
There are other, less severe '"negative" psychological symptoms long noted in PTSD: anhedonia
Anhedonia
In psychology and psychiatry, anhedonia is defined as the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable, e.g. hobbies, exercise, social interaction or sexual activity....
(the inability to feel pleasure) and a general emotional numbness': such lesser emotional reactivity is an arguably natural reaction to stress. Those displaying on this end of the spectrum may self-report dissociation
Dissociation
Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning. Dissociation is most commonly experienced as a subjective perception of one's consciousness being detached from...
but no psychological distress per se. People diagnosed with this disorder often endure a chronic course of blunted affect with the onset being subtle yet considerable.
Affective flattening
Affective flattening is a general category which includes diminishment of, or absence of, emotional expressiveness. It is sometimes inappropriately equated with blunted or restricted affect. "Blunted" is affect that is present but only with minimal degrees of emotions evident. "Restriction" is a holding back as in alexithymiaAlexithymia
Alexithymia from the Ancient Greek words λέξις and θυμός modified by an alpha-privative—literally "without words for emotions"—is a term coined by psychotherapist Peter Sifneos in 1973 to describe a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing...
. "Restricted" is not as severe as in flattened or blunted affect.
Constricted affect is an affect type that represents mild reduction in the range and intensity of emotional expression. If the client is consistently euphoric and all intensity is congruent but is unaffected by content, this would be still considered constricted to a euphoric affect.
Labile affect refers to the pathological expression of laughter, crying, or smiling. It is also known as "Pseudobulbar Affect", "Emotional Lability", "Pathological Laughter and Crying", or, historically, "Emotional Incontinence". An individual may find themselves laughing uncontrollably at something that is only moderately funny, being unable to stop themselves for several minutes.
Qualities describing the affective response include:
- concordance (expressed emotion seems to fit what patient is saying, doing) appropriateness, responsiveness (expressed emotion sensibly follows from the precipitating stimuli)
- full range/stable (normal variation of emotions during exam)
- restricted, constricted range (limited variability of emotion during exam)
- labile (type or intensity shifts suddenly, rapidly)
- blunted (few emotions expressed, low intensity)
- flat (affect is even less intense than blunted; patient may appear inanimate)
- exaggerated intensity
Related symptoms
Blunted affect is very similar to anhedonia, the decrease or cessation of all feelings of pleasure (which thus affects enjoyment, happiness, fun, interest, and satisfaction). In the case of anhedonia, emotions relating to pleasure will not be expressed as much or at all because they are literally not experienced or are decreased. Both blunted affect and anhedonia are considered negative symptoms of schizophreniaSchizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
, meaning that they are indicative of a lack of something. There are some other negative symptoms of schizophrenia which include avolition
Avolition
Avolition is a psychological state characterized by general lack of drive, or motivation to pursue meaningful goals. A person may show little participation in work or have little interest in socializing. They may sit still for long periods of time...
, alogia
Alogia
In psychology, alogia , or poverty of speech, is a general lack of additional, unprompted content seen in normal speech. As a symptom, it is commonly seen in patients suffering from schizophrenia, and is considered as a negative symptom...
and catatonic behaviour.
Closely related is alexithymia
Alexithymia
Alexithymia from the Ancient Greek words λέξις and θυμός modified by an alpha-privative—literally "without words for emotions"—is a term coined by psychotherapist Peter Sifneos in 1973 to describe a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing...
- a condition describing people who 'lack words for their feelings. Indeed, they seem to lack feelings altogether. although this may actually be because of their inability to express emotion rather than from an absence of emotion altogether'. Alexithymic patients however can provide clues via assessment presentation which may be indicative of emotional arousal.
'If the amygdala
Amygdala
The ' are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system.-...
is severed from the rest of the brain, the result is a striking inability to gauge the emotional significance of events; this condition is sometimes called "affective blindness"'.
Culture
Cultural critics frequently cite 'Frederic Jameson's idea of a flattened postmodern space linked to a flattened affect or a loss of psychological depth' - stressing 'consumer capitalismConsumer capitalism
Consumer capitalism is a theoretical economic and political condition in which consumer demand is manipulated, in a deliberate and coordinated way, on a very large scale, through mass-marketing techniques, to the advantage of sellers....
's pervasive simulacra and flattened affect'.