Emotions are motivational and functional, helping people connect to others, respond to situations, and learn about the world. Yet, the lack of emotions when emotions are expected, termed emotional numbness , is also associated with several psychological disorders (e.g., depression, post-traumatic stress). However, little research has explored what emotional numbness feels like, attitudes toward the experience of numbness, or the frequency of this phenomenon outside of diagnosable disorders. The current research aims to explore these questions in a qualitative study ( n = 94), in which participants were asked open-ended questions regarding their experience of emotional numbness, followed by a survey-based study with novel quantitative ratings ( n = 256) to confirm findings and further explore questions posed by Study 1.We found that emotional numbness is a common experience (i.e., only four participants across both studies reported having never experienced emotional numbness) and considered a problem for over half of participants. We identified common symptoms (e.g., staying in bed more), confirmed that frequency and severity of numbness is associated with alexithymia (both studies) and symptoms of psychopathology (Study 1). We also found that some people intentionally seek numbness and that greater numbness severity is associated with both positive and negative attitudes toward numbness (Study 2). Overall, these two studies confirmed that numbness is not related only to trauma or depression but is a fairly common experience worthy of additional study.
Westfall et al. (Fri,) studied this question.