Emotional responsivity

Emotional responsivity refers to the degree, immediacy, and appropriateness of an individual's emotional reactions to internal or external stimuli. It encompasses both intensity (how strong the emotion is) and latency (how quickly it arises), as well as regulation (how well it's modulated or sustained). In psychological and neuroscientific contexts, emotional responsivity is often used to evaluate affective processing, particularly in disorders such as, PTSD, borderline personality disorders, schizophrenia and autism.

Two key axes:

Hyporesponsivity – Diminished or blunted emotional response, often observed in conditions like schizophrenia or psychopathy.

Hyperresponsivity – Heightened, exaggerated emotional reactivity, common in mood disorders or emotionally unstable personality types.

Emotional responsivity is connected to broader psychology concepts about emotions. People exhibit emotions in response to outside stimuli. Positive affective stimuli trigger feelings of pleasure such as happiness; negative affective stimuli trigger feelings of displeasure such as disgust and fear. Emotional responses include but are not limited to facial expressions and neurophysiological activities. For example, people display a “smile” when exposed to positive stimuli and a “frown” when exposed to negative stimuli. The feeling associated with emotion is called an affect, which can be categorized by valence and arousal. Valence describes the degree to which the feeling is a pleasure or displeasure. Arousal describes the degree to which a person is awoken by outside stimuli.