People who frequently experience a deep sense of inner emptiness often struggle to maintain a solid identity and regulate their emotions. A recent study using smartphones has mapped how emptiness fluctuates from day to day and relates to broader personality challenges. The study was published in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.
Mental health professionals often hear patients describe feeling a deep emptiness within themselves, believing that nothing matters, and lacking a sense of who they are. Currently, the most widely used psychiatric diagnostic manual lists emptiness as the only symptom of borderline personality disorder. The manual also limits this definition by requiring that emotions be chronic and unchanging states. As a result, many psychologists view this feeling as a permanent trait rather than a temporary state that can come and go.
Psychologists are increasingly recognizing that the subjective experience of emptiness extends far beyond a single clinical diagnosis. Previous research has linked this feeling to depression, anxiety, and a general lack of purpose in life. It is also often reported by people who do not meet the criteria for certain mental health disorders. This experience appears to be a combination of emotional numbness, a profound sense of social disconnection, and a lack of personal fulfillment.
Modern psychology’s dimensional model proposes that unhealthy personality traits generally fall into two broad areas of dysfunction. The first area involves how a person views themselves. This includes self-direction and maintaining a consistent identity. The second area involves how people relate to others, including intimacy and empathy. Emptiness involves feeling disconnected from the world and isolated from oneself, so perhaps it touches on both of these areas.
Emotions are often considered to be a fixed state, so researchers rarely measure how they change within a single person over time. Amanda A. Uliashek, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto, set out to understand how feelings of emptiness work on a daily basis. Uliashek, along with colleagues Amanda Magruno, Sarina Zedan, and Mark A. Fournier, wanted to know how the trait of emptiness relates to people’s overall personality functioning. They also aimed to identify factors that predict whether a person’s feelings of emptiness are stable or highly variable.
To capture the day-to-day ebb and flow of human emotions, the researchers used a technique called experience sampling. This method asks participants to text their smartphones at random times throughout the day and ask them how they’re feeling at that moment. Rather than relying on a person’s memory of how they felt over the past month, experience sampling acts like a psychological snapshot. The study included a sample of 120 adults from the general community. Seven participants were ultimately excluded due to technical issues, leaving 113 participants for the final analysis.
After completing an initial set of questionnaires assessing basic personality traits and the ability to regulate emotions, participants downloaded a specialized application onto their mobile devices. The Regulatory Study measured how well people were able to accept negative emotions, take goal-directed actions, and maintain emotional clarity. Over a 14-day period, the application sent four random alerts each day. At each prompt, the software asked participants to rate how strongly they felt sad, angry, fearful, or empty in the previous hour. A rating of 1 means that you did not feel the emotion at all, and a rating of 7 means that you felt the emotion very much.
By analyzing thousands of these daily reports, the researchers were able to distinguish between a person’s average baseline level of emptiness and how that feeling fluctuated over a two-week period. They compared these daily records to the original personality survey. The results showed that people who reported higher average levels of emptiness were much more likely to suffer from identity disorder. In particular, certain traits characterized by feeling as if one’s identity was completely lacking were strong predictors of chronic feelings of emptiness.
The ability to maintain a consistent sense of self is a core element of healthy personality functioning. When people lack a solid identity, they can feel as though they are inauthentic or lacking a soul. The data suggest that this lack of selfhood is closely related to the average amount of emptiness people experience on a daily basis. Surprisingly, the researchers found that a lack of self-direction did not predict elevated feelings of emptiness, even though aimlessness is sometimes thought to be a behavioral side effect of feelings of emptiness.
The researchers also looked at how stable or unstable the feeling of emptiness was for each person. They found that highly variable feelings of emptiness were associated with a variety of psychological challenges. People who experience frequent spikes and dips in their feelings of emptiness tend to struggle with intimacy in their relationships. When individuals lack close and consistent relationships or tend to mirror the behavior of those with whom they interact, their internal environment becomes highly dependent on external social cues. This dependence can cause feelings of emptiness to change from moment to moment in response to changes in social conditions.
Empty instability was also associated with certain difficulties in regulating emotions. People with high fluctuations in emptiness reported limited access to effective strategies to cope with negative emotions. They also had trouble understanding or pinpointing the emotions they were experiencing. This suggests that different levels of emptiness may reflect a person’s struggle to regulate negative experiential states and a tendency to respond to disruption with emotional withdrawal.
Looking at the daily prompts, researchers found a strong relationship between emptiness and other negative emotional states. If participants reported feeling more sad, fearful, or angry than their individual average, they also reported feeling more empty. Sadness stood out as having a particularly close relationship with emptiness. Of all the emotions measured, a person’s overall baseline level of sadness was the only predictor of their overall baseline level of emptiness. This overlap between sadness and emptiness may explain why clinical depression is frequently accompanied by complaints of inner emptiness.
The study also yielded some completely unexpected findings about how people relate to others. When assessing baseline personality traits, the researchers found that higher average emptiness was associated with higher empathic abilities. The authors suggest that people who experience emptiness may sometimes feel deeply for others, allowing them to better understand and empathize with their pain. However, the researchers note that replication is needed to see if this particular result holds true for other populations.
Although smartphone tracking provides a detailed view of daily life, this study has several limitations. The researchers used a single question to measure momentary feelings of emptiness, rather than a comprehensive multi-item survey. Future daily tracking studies may benefit from broader methods for measuring the nuances of emotional blankness.
Because this sample was also drawn from the general community, participants generally exhibited relatively low baseline levels of negative emotions. Similar evaluations in clinical populations may reveal different patterns or stronger associations. Because the researchers analyzed everyday emotions without observing time delays between prompts, they could not determine whether feelings of emptiness cause sadness or whether sadness makes people feel empty.
The study, “Emptiness, Personality Dysfunction, and Emotion Dysregulation: An Experience Sampling Study,” was authored by Amanda A. Uliashek, Amanda Magruno, Sarina Zedan, and Marc A. Fournier.
