People experiencing blunted affect say that it is even hard for them to force their faces into emotional expressions (Ekman, 2003 Gabay et al., 2015).Īs you might imagine, being on either side of the equation in a conversation where somebody has blunted affect can be difficult. A person with blunted affect will also respond without emotion to events that would evoke emotions in most people, such as learning that one received a promotion or that a loved one was in a car accident. On the outside, blunted affect may involve speech that is monotone or robotic, where the words you would expect to hear emphasized are not. Let’s look at the symptoms of blunted affect in more detail.
(Many people refer to blunted affect as “flat affect” and many people with schizophrenia experience blunted affect – more on both topics in a moment.) You might notice that this person engages in very few gestures and that her facial expression remains consistently neutral throughout the video, even as she discusses experiences that might be upsetting for her. To see blunted affect in action, you can watch this video, in which a person with schizophrenia describes her experience of having blunted affect. It may also be thought of as a reduced affect display. Typically, this means minimal demonstration of emotion through facial expressions, making less eye contact in conversation, using fewer gestures and other forms of body language to express emotion, and having a flat tone of voice (Padmanabhan & Keshavan, 2016). Affect is a word psychologists use for the expression of emotions, and blunted in this case means dulled, weakened, or slowed down. Blunted affect is when a person shows almost no emotion.
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