People who experience a frequent inner void may actually possess higher levels of empathy

People who frequently experience a profound inner void often struggle with maintaining a firm sense of identity and regulating their emotions. A recent smartphone-based study maps how the sensation of emptiness fluctuates from day to day and relates to broader personality challenges. The research was published in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.

Mental health professionals often hear patients describe feeling a deep void inside, believing that nothing matters, or lacking a sense of who they are. Currently, the most widely used psychiatric diagnostic manual only lists emptiness as a symptom of borderline personality disorder. The manual also restricts this definition by requiring the feeling to be a chronic, unchanging condition. As a result, many psychologists view the sensation 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 investigations have connected the 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 any specific mental health disorder. The experience seems to involve a combination of emotional numbness, a severe sense of social disconnection, and a lack of personal fulfillment.

Modern dimensional models of psychology propose that unhealthy personality traits generally fall into two broad areas of dysfunction. The first area involves how a person views themselves, which includes self-direction and maintaining a coherent identity. The second area involves how a person relates to others, which encompasses intimacy and empathy. Because emptiness involves feeling disconnected from the world and detached from oneself, it likely touches upon both of these domains.

Because the feeling is often viewed as a constant state, researchers rarely measure how it might change within a single person over time. Amanda A. Uliaszek, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto, set out to understand how the feeling of emptiness operates on a daily basis. Along with colleagues Amanda Magurno, Saleena Zedan, and Marc A. Fournier, Uliaszek wanted to see how the trait of emptiness relates to people’s overall personality functioning. They also aimed to determine what factors predict whether a person’s feelings of emptiness are stable or highly variable.

To capture the daily ebb and flow of human emotion, the researchers used a technique called experience sampling. This method involves pinging participants on their smartphones at random times throughout the day to ask them how they are feeling right in that specific moment. Instead of 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 one hundred and twenty adults from the general community. Seven participants were eventually excluded due to technical issues, leaving one hundred and thirteen individuals in the final analysis.

After completing an initial battery of questionnaires assessing their baseline personality traits and their ability to regulate emotions, the participants downloaded a specialized application to their mobile devices. The regulation survey measured how well people can accept negative feelings, engage in goal-directed behaviors, and maintain emotional clarity. Over the course of fourteen days, the application sent four random alerts each day. At each prompt, the software asked participants to rate how intensely they had felt sad, angry, afraid, or empty during the previous hour. A rating of one meant they did not feel the emotion at all, while a rating of seven meant they felt it extremely.

By analyzing thousands of these daily reports, the research team could distinguish between a person’s average baseline level of emptiness and the way that feeling fluctuated over the two weeks. They compared these daily logs against the initial personality surveys. The results showed that people who reported a higher average level of emptiness were much more likely to suffer from identity disturbances. In particular, a specific trait characterized by feeling as though one completely lacks an identity was a strong predictor of chronic emptiness.

The ability to maintain a consistent sense of self is a core component of healthy personality functioning. When people lack a consolidated identity, they may feel as though they are not real or that they lack a soul. The data suggest that this specific deficit in selfhood is closely tied to the average amount of emptiness a person experiences day-to-day. Surprisingly, the researchers found that a lack of self-direction did not predict elevated feelings of emptiness, even though aimlessness is sometimes assumed to be a behavioral side effect of feeling empty.

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 different psychological challenges. People whose sense of emptiness spiked and crashed frequently tended to struggle with intimacy in their interpersonal relationships. When individuals lack close, consistent relationships or tend to mirror the behaviors of whomever they are interacting with, their internal environment relies heavily on external social cues. This reliance likely causes their feelings of emptiness to vary from hour to hour based on changing social conditions.

Instability in emptiness was also linked to specific difficulties in emotion regulation. People with highly fluctuating emptiness reported having limited access to effective strategies for coping with negative emotions. They also struggled to understand or accurately identify the emotions they were experiencing. This suggests that varying levels of emptiness might reflect a person’s struggle to adjust negative experiential states and a tendency to respond to confusion with emotional withdrawal.

When looking at the daily prompts, the researchers noted a strong relationship between emptiness and other negative affective states. On occasions when participants reported feeling more sad, afraid, or angry than their personal average, they also reported feeling more empty. Sadness stood out as having an especially tight relationship with the void. Out of all the emotions measured, a person’s overall baseline level of sadness was the only one that predicted their overall baseline level of emptiness. This overlap between sadness and emptiness might explain why clinical depression is so frequently accompanied by complaints of an inner void.

The study also yielded one entirely unexpected finding regarding how people relate to others. When evaluating baseline personality traits, the researchers found that higher average emptiness was associated with a higher capacity for empathy. The authors suggest that people who feel empty might occasionally feel things deeply for others, allowing them to better understand and identify with other people’s pain. They note, however, that this specific result requires replication to see if it holds true in other populations.

While the smartphone tracking offers a detailed look at daily life, the study has a few limitations. The researchers measured the momentary feeling of emptiness using a single question, rather than a comprehensive, multi-item survey. Future daily tracking studies could benefit from a more expansive way to measure the nuances of the emotional void.

The sample was also drawn from the general community, meaning the participants generally exhibited relatively low baseline levels of negative emotions. Conducting a similar assessment in a clinical population might reveal different patterns or stronger associations. Because the researchers analyzed daily emotions without looking at time delays between the prompts, they could not determine whether feeling empty causes sadness or if sadness causes a person to feel empty.

The study, “Emptiness, Personality Dysfunction, and Emotion Dysregulation: An Experience Sampling Study,” was authored by Amanda A. Uliaszek, Amanda Magurno, Saleena Zedan, and Marc A. Fournier.