Affective flattening is a disorder that causes a decrease in emotional expressiveness in the presence of an apparently normal emotional experience.
It is a very typical symptom of schizophrenia and people who suffer from it have very high deficits in experiencing pleasure, despite having an emotional state that is interpreted as “normal”.
That is, individuals with affective flattening have an adequate mood and do not experience a negative or depressed mood. However, its emotional expression is highly limited.
Affective flattening is a complex and difficult situation to treat, which can have a very negative impact on the person’s quality of life and social, family or professional performance.
Features
Affective flattening is a symptom defined by the presentation of highly reduced emotional expressiveness.
In this way, people suffering from this disorder are unable to experience feelings of pleasure or gratification and therefore do not express them at any time.
Individuals with affective flattening are never happy, happy or excited, as they do not experience such emotions, regardless of whether or not they have reason to do so.
Thus, your emotionality is, as its name implies, completely flattened. The fact that the person’s affective area is “flattened” implies that positive or pleasant sensations are not experienced, but not negative or unpleasant ones.
In this sense, affective flattening usually leads to a state of indifference in which the person doesn’t care about everything. Any stimulus is as pleasant as it is unpleasant, so it completely loses its rewarding capacity and the experience of hedonic sensations.
Affective flattening versus depression
To properly understand affective flattening, it is important to differentiate it from depression or mood swings.
The individual who presents this symptom does not suffer from depression. In fact, his mood is preserved and he has no depressed or depressed mood.
People with affective flattening often refer to normal emotional experiences in terms of valence and mood, so that the typical changes that depression produces are not present.
However, affective flattening causes the inability to experience pleasure, so that the subject who suffers from it rarely expresses a happy or elevated mood.
Likewise, it will not express intense emotional states or experiencing pleasant feelings or sensations.
Thus, it is common to confuse affective flattening with depression, as in both cases the person usually has difficulties enjoying, feeling pleasure or being happy.
However, both alterations are differentiated by the presence of depressed mood (depression) or normal mood (affective flattening).
Consequences
Affective flattening usually does not have a clear and direct impact on a person’s mood. Thus, the individual, despite not feeling pleasure, is generally not depressed.
However, this alteration causes two main repercussions for the subject. The first has to do with your own personal experience and well-being, and the second with your social field and the personal relationships you establish.
As for the first consequence, affective flattening usually leads the individual to a flat and neutral functioning. That is, the subject develops a behavior that is not marked by any stimulus or special condition.
The person with affective flattening does not want to spend their day shopping, watching TV, or gardening. All activities gratify you, or rather cease to gratify you equally, so you have no specific preferences, motivations, or tastes.
Regarding the relational field, the flat and indifferent functioning caused by affective flattening can cause problems in relationships, family and friends.
Likewise, the absence of emotionality, the inability to experience joy, and the absence of affection in expression often negatively affect the most intimate personal relationships as well.
Affective flattening and schizophrenia
Affective flattening is one of the typical manifestations of schizophrenia. Specifically, it refers to one of the known negative symptoms of the disease.
Generally, schizophrenia is related to suffering from delusions and hallucinations (positive symptoms). However, negative symptoms often play a much or even more important role in the development of the pathology.
In this sense, the affective flattening of individuals with schizophrenia can be accompanied by other manifestations, such as:
- Apathy
- Persevering thought.
- Bradypsychia
- language poverty
- Poverty of language content.
- Higher response latency.
Association between affect flattening and involvement in emotion regulation
Some studies suggest that affective flattening may be (in part) due to the effect of emotion regulation.
The emotion regulation condition is composed of two main strategies related to different moments of the emotional response: the strategies that precede the emotional response and the strategies that trigger the emotional response.
Strategies that precede the emotional response are applied by people before the emotion is generated and influence its behavioral and subjective expression.
Rather, the strategies applied after the emotional response is triggered involve controlling the experience, expression, and physiological mechanisms related to the emotion.
In this sense, recent studies postulate that the affective flattening observed in patients with schizophrenia may be related to a deficit in the regulatory process called «amplification».
That is, affective flattening can be caused by increased behavioral expression of an emotion when it has already been triggered.
