The affective flattening it 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, his 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.
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 feelings 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 or not they have reasons to do so.
Thus, its emotionality is, as its 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 as pleasant as it is unpleasant for him, so he completely loses his gratifying capacity and the experimentation of hedonic sensations.
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 depressed or depressed mood..
People with affective flattening usually refer 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 from 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..
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.
Regarding 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 care to spend their day shopping, watching television, or gardening. All activities reward him, or rather, they cease to reward 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 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..
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 an equally 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:
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 their behavioral and subjective expression.
On the other hand, the strategies that are applied once the emotional response is triggered imply the control of the experience, of the expression and of the physiological mechanisms related to the 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”.
That is, affective flattening could be caused by the increase in the behavioral expression of an emotion when it has already been triggered..
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