Emotional Blunting

Emotional blunting, also called emotional numbing or formally reduced affect display, is a condition of reduced emotional reactivity in a person, appearing as low emotional expressivity, whether verbal or nonverbal, especially when discussing issues that would normally be expected to engage emotion. Expressive gestures become rare and there is little animation in facial expression or vocal inflection, and the condition can be symptomatic of autism, schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or schizoid personality disorder, or can arise as a side effect of medications such as antipsychotics and antidepressants. It is distinguished from apathy and from anhedonia, which refer explicitly to a lack of emotional sensation rather than to a reduction in how emotion is outwardly expressed.