AFFECTIVE FLATTENING: CHARACTERISTICS, CONSEQUENCES, DISORDERS - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The affective flattening is an alteration 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 to experience 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, her emotional expression is highly limited.

The affective flattening is a complex and difficult situation to deal with that can have a very negative impact on the quality of life of the person and on their social, family or work functioning.

Characteristics of affective flattening

The affective flattening is a symptom that is defined by the presentation of a highly reduced emotional expressiveness.

In this way, people who suffer from this alteration are unable to experience sensations of pleasure or gratification, and therefore, do not express them at any time.

Individuals with affective flattening are never happy, happy or excited, since they do not experience these emotions, regardless of whether they have reasons to do so or not.

Thus, his emotionality is, as the name suggests, completely flattened. The fact that the affective area of ​​the person is "flattened" implies that positive or pleasant sensations are not experienced but neither negative or unpleasant.

In this sense, affective flattening usually leads to a state of indifference in which the person does not care about everything. Any stimulus is both pleasant and unpleasant for him, so he completely loses his gratifying capacity and the experimentation of hedonic sensations.

Affective flattening vs depression

In order to properly understand affective flattening it is important to differentiate it from depression or mood disturbances.

The individual with this symptom is not depressed. In fact, his mood is preserved and he does not have a low or depressed mood.

People with affective flattening tend to report normal emotional experiences in terms of valence and mood, so the typical alterations that depression produces are not present.

However, affective flattening produces the inability to experience pleasure, so that the subject who suffers it will rarely express a happy or elevated mood.

Likewise, it will not express intense emotional states or the experimentation of pleasant feelings or sensations.

In this way, it is common to confuse affective flattening with depression since in both cases the person usually has difficulties to enjoy, experience pleasure or be cheerful.

However, both alterations are differentiated by the presence of a low (depression) or normal (affective flattening) mood.

Consequences

The affective flattening does not usually have a clear and direct impact on the person's mood. In this way, the individual, despite not experiencing pleasure, does not usually become depressed.

However, this alteration causes two major main repercussions for the subject. The first has to do with your own personal experience and well-being, and the second with your social environment and the personal relationships you establish.

As regards the first consequence, the 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 care to spend their day shopping, watching television, or gardening. All activities reward him, or rather, they stop rewarding him equally, so he does not have specific preferences, motivations or tastes.

With regard to the relational sphere, the flat and indifferent functioning that causes the affective flattening can cause problems with their relationships, family and friends.

Likewise, the absence of emotion, the inability to experience joy and the absence of affection in expression, usually also has a negative impact on the most intimate personal relationships.

Affective flattening and schizophrenia

The affective flattening is one of the typical manifestations of schizophrenia. Specifically, it refers to one of the known negative symptoms of the disease.

Schizophrenia is commonly associated with delusions and hallucinations (positive symptoms). However, negative symptoms often play as much or even more important role in the development of the pathology.

In this sense, the affective flattening suffered by subjects with schizophrenia can be accompanied by other manifestations, such as:

1. Apathy.
2. Persistent thinking.
3. Bradipsychia
4. Poor language.
5. Poverty of language content.
6. Increased response latency.

Association between affective flattening and affection of emotional regulation

Some studies suggest that affective flattening could be due (in part) to impaired emotional regulation.

The affection of emotional regulation is made up of two main strategies that are related to different moments of the emotional response: the strategies that precede the emotional response and the strategies that trigger the emotional response.

The strategies that precede the emotional response are applied by people before the generation of the emotion, and influence its behavioral and subjective expression.

In contrast, the strategies that are applied once the emotional response is triggered involve the control of experience, expression, and physiological mechanisms related to emotion.

In this sense, recent studies postulate that the affective flattening observed in patients with schizophrenia could be related to a deficit in the regulatory process called «amplification».

In other words, affective flattening could be caused by the increase in the behavioral expression of an emotion when it has already been triggered.

References

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5. Kay SR: Positive and Negative Syndromes in Schizophrenia. Assessment end Research. Brauner / Mazel N. York, 1991.
6. Henry J, Green M, Grisham JEmotion Dysregulation and Schizotypy. Psychiatry Research 166 (2-3): 116-124, Apr 2009.