Hi, my name is Stephanie and today I want to talk to you about something called
flat affect. Really quickly, thank you to my patrons for voting on
this video topic and a quick merch shout out.
This design and others are available at the merch link below. Now, something
that is on the common list of symptoms or signs is
something called flat effect or affect or ... I'm pretty sure
I'm saying that word right, but I'm not, like, a hundred percent.
It's one of those things that I never really bothered looking into a whole lot
because I figured that probably didn't really apply that much to me
and probably applied to other people. And quite frankly, I hadn't really heard it
actually described, like, used to describe me or
anyone else. So, I just it didn't seem super pressing to
look into. So, let's look into what affect even
means in this context. According to a
definition I found on the University of Washington's
website, affect in psychology is an immediately
expressed and observed emotion. A feeling state becomes an affect when
it is observable, for example, as overall demeanor or tone
and modulation of voice. Affect is to be distinguished from mood, which refers to
a pervasive and sustained emotion. There are varying
degrees of affect or basically what would be
considered a range of affect, and this glossary definition really does
help parse out what exactly those are and what they mean. A
range of affect may be described as broad, which is normal, restricted or
constricted, blunted, or flat. The normal expression of
affect involves variability in facial expression,
pitch of voice, and the use of hand and body movements.
Restricted affect is characterized by a clear reduction
in the expressive range and intensity of affects.
Blunted affect is marked by a severe reduction
in the intensity of affective expression. In flat affect, there is a lack of signs
of affective expression: the voice may be
monotonous and the face immobile. Affect is inappropriate when it
is clearly discordant with the content of the person's speech
or ideation. So, I found this interesting because it
sounds a whole lot like what autistic people
use as what they're masking over. So, not only, maybe, people
masking autistic traits to hide things, but also to
bring expression to your face to seem more engaged and more acting like
other people and kind of mirroring what people are doing
and seeming more like you're pleasant because you know that if you don't put
on a face, you seem unpleasant. Now, when I
initially saw this, I thought, you know, that doesn't really apply to me.
Because I know I can be pretty expressive. I feel that I'm pretty
expressive, especially on these videos where
I'm more comfortable and I'm just in front of a camera and there's no one
there to judge me so much. But then I began to think more about it.
Whenever I'm out of, like, energy or depressed
or basically going into, like, a shutdown, my facial expression
does turn quite flat. My voice sometimes will literally go monotonous
or robotic as some might put it. I can't,
like, do the energy that it takes to put the right
intonation to everything or the right inflection or
whatever of your voice and the expressions and everything. It's just,
like, I don't, there is no energy to do this anymore.
I'm done. A lot of times, I'm putting a lot of
energy into trying to sound, like, genuinely ... I'm not even sure how to
explain, but a lot of times, I'll still get called
out when maybe I "genuinely" laugh about something
that really wasn't that funny, and then people are like, was that, was
that, like, a really fake, did you just? And then they noticed that
I was masking so that's kind of awkward. And then when I realized that
apparently people just make the right face when they're
talking with someone who's having issues or whatever
and they don't have to think about, like, how does my face look? Do I look like I,
do I look like I'm being nice? I don't want to look rude.
Do I look rude right now? People typically just
make the expression that they're feeling in the moment
and sound the way that they just sound and they make sense together
so people can read what their momentary thing is right then, if that makes sense.
So, this is definitely a thing commonly seen in autism,
and while I don't think I necessarily fall under
flat affect, I do think that I do naturally ... lie more on the
restricted affect kind of plane or field
of things. I've definitely seen other people who
are pretty much continuously at a flat affect,
and that's just not my, me. That I have a lot of expressiveness
when I'm talking with people. Unless if it's something
to do with depression, or I am pulling from my insides to tell you
difficult things. When I have to talk about
things that are hard for me to get around my mental blocks
to tell you, then I will be very flat tone and expression, etc. So, when i'm
recording these videos, I try to hype myself up a little bit so
that you're not super bored watching this. That's just
really kind of a natural thing that people do anyway. However,
I often forget about that and so I'll start with, like, a
this. Feels like this at the beginning. And if I start to go off script much
like I feel like I'm literally just so close to doing right
now, I tend to start to get lost in my mind
and thinking and stuff and so then my face,
especially my face. I don't know why. When I'm not
thinking about it, I have such a, I don't know. I don't like my facial
expression. [laughs] And then, of course, my, my voice kind of
flattens out and becomes more monotone. I, I really wouldn't say that I have a flat
affect. I think that sometimes it's a little more restricted or blunted when
I'm just being me and not trying to put on something for other people
and stuff like that. I also think that the whole
inappropriate affect is something that's more like a technical
term to what I feel that often happens with me. When it comes
to things that really aren't that important, I'm super excited
about the way someone said something. I might come across as super excited, and
oh my goodness, that was, like, the best thing in the whole wide
world. Yeah, sure, I found delight in it, but
it wasn't amazing. Yet, when there's something that's super important,
especially when it's dealing with me, I might not be able to express it that way.
So, I might say, oh, I just have something I want to tell you
and well... it's just, there's like this limit
on it, I guess. So, it's almost like a lot of times, my expressions and reactions
are almost inverse to what you might normally expect,
and maybe I'm being a bit broad in a generalization here ,so I could be wrong
here, but that seems to kind of fall under the concept
of having an inappropriate affect. If I were to say
I'm so excited, and I wasn't being sarcastic, like,
I'm so excited, but instead, I was just saying, oh, yeah,
I'm so excited. That's gonna be hard for someone to believe me, right?
So, that would be an inappropriate affect. If I really was excited,
but that's all I could give you. That would be an inappropriate and probably
flat affect. To be clear, flat affect itself is not a
condition. It is a symptom or sign of another
condition. Kind of like having a side effect. In
fact, it actually can be a side effect of medication.
It can be a sign or symptom of autism. Schizophrenia seems to be the
largest one that will come up when you search about flat affect,
and, of course, it can be because of depression, which is something I
personally can attest to. Just as with anything on my channel,
please realize that when we're talking about, like, one
concept or one idea or whatnot, that doesn't necessarily mean that
everyone who has experienced that is autistic or is something. Flat affect,
as I just mentioned, can be a sign or a symptom of
a lot of things. Doesn't necessarily mean someone is autistic.
However, if you are suspecting autism, and you have a ton of signs, this might
be one of them that also contributes to the possibility. Sadly,
this might be part of why autistic children
have difficulty making friends. It can be really hard because we can come off as,
like, cold and unfeeling, when that's just, like,
what our face does. It's not really our fault. It's just
our brain does something different and that also can affect
the way that we naturally express with our face and
our tone of voice and our gestures. Note that flat affect or any range of affect
doesn't mean that the person isn't feeling.
So, just because they aren't expressing it with their tone of voice and the
expression on their face and with their hands and whatever else,
that doesn't mean that they're not feeling the happiness or their
excitement or whatever else. It just means that their affect is
not, I guess, appropriate in that situation. As with most things,
people wanted to know if there was a solution to the problem of flat affect.
And it appears that there are two methods of dealing with this.
One, we get rid of the problem that's causing flat effect, because, again,
flat affect is not a condition itself but a symptom or a sign of another
condition. So, if it's depression, and we handle the
depression, maybe the flat effect goes, right? However,
with autism, there isn't a way to just make autism go
away, right? And in some other cases, you can't just make things go away or take
away the medication that might be causing a flat affect, so then there's
option number two, which is basically masking. Teaching
people how to change their voice
and their expressions, etc. to adapt to the situation
and the conversation. What the appropriate kind of response would be
to make you look as interested or as caring
as you are on the inside. Really quickly, I wanted to show you just kind of
something that was lingering in the back of my mind. A picture, it's actually
still frame from when I was ending one of my videos. In it,
I'm just smiling to myself as I turn off the camera. So, when I saw it at first, I
was like, oh, well that's kind of cool. I kind of, I like that. I, I'm smiling and
looking into the camera, and you know what? I'll
put that as my profile picture. That, that looks nice, right? However, later on,
I would realize how muted my expression looks compared to when I actually
smile for others or smile for typical, like, picture taking. For example,
if you were telling me I was taking a picture,
I might do this. Okay? This isn't my natural smile. Most people
don't use their natural smile for pictures because it-
I don't think they do. Do they? What was weird to me is like, that was my genuine
smile to myself and just, like, ... and it was weird to me
because I realized later that looks really muted when I
didn't think it did at first. It's just weird to me. I learned
to smile specifically for cameras when I was a child, because when I was a child,
everyone kept telling me to smile for a family picture. I was smiling,
and I guess, maybe I did have some sort of blunted or muted or even flat
affect, because they told me I wasn't smiling. But, like, I was
smiling. And so the photographer thought she
would solve the problem by telling me to show
my teeth. Of course, my genius brain took her literally,
took it out of the context of smiling, and showed her my teeth.
And, of course, my older sister convinced my family that was the best picture we
were going to get and so that picture hung on our family wall for
a long time. So, I learned how to smile in pictures
for the most part. But the one where I was turning off the camera,
that's just me. That's just me smiling how I smile, not
for anyone else. Just to smile. That's just what I look like.
Again, I don't think it's flat effect for me, personally.
Most of the case, I think it's just more muted or blunted,
or maybe restricted than typically it is for other people.
Unless, of course, affect has to be in the social situation. I don't know that part,
so take my last part of this video, which is
my personal thoughts regarding myself, with a grain
of salt in that regard. Anyway, if you enjoyed this video, go ahead and
hit that like button. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Do you have flat affect? Did you know that RBF
could be, in some situations, flat affect, etc.?
Let me know your thoughts. If you're interested in hearing autism-related
content from me, you can go ahead and hit that
subscribe button. I upload to this channel every Thursday at 4 p.m
central standard time. Thank you to my patrons for supporting me
through Patreon, and a special thank you to my Spaz tier patron,
Brian Kleinhammer. I hope you're having a wonderful week, and I'll see you in my
next video. Bye!