What is affective flattening?
Affective flattening, sometimes called dull or flat effect, is a psychological symptom characterized by reduced or missing emotional reactions. It is associated with a number of psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia. The effect is a psychological term for external depiction of emotions such as gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions, laughter and tears. Some affective flattening is normal, such as what occurs as part of childhood maturation to adulthood. Different cultures have different standards of appropriate intensity and method of emotional display, so it is important to stay culturally sensitive when evaluating affective flattening.
While a flat effect is often used to describe a seriously reduced emotional display than a dull effect, both symptoms are a type of affective flattening. Emotional displays and affective flattening can be understood as a continuum rather than a set of discrete symptomurate emotional displays differ between cultures, subcultures and individuals. The evaluation of the intensity of the emotional view is thusé subjective experience.
The less extreme version in which the range of emotional display is slightly limited compared to the social standard is known as a narrowed or limited influence. It is also called alexythymia, the narrow influence is considered to be a personality trait rather than a psychological disorder, although it is associated with psychiatric conditions, including autism, post -traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), main depressive disorders (MDD), anorexia and bulimia. Alexythymia is also a risk factor for various psychiatric disorders.
In addition to affective flattening, abnormal influence can also manifest as a heterogeneous or improperly exaggerated manifestations of emotions. The effect may be reasonably positive or negative, but inappropriate in intensity, such as tears breaking due to little disappointment. The unstable effect is characterized by uncontrollable and socially inappropriate laughs, smiling or tears. Is common in patients with damageBrain, dementia and disease Lou Gehrig or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Labile influence may also indicate a disorder of hyperactivity with a lack of attention (ADHD) in adults.