Isolation, Withdrawal, and Detachment Scale
The Isolation, Withdrawal, and Detachment Scale uses 40 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Social Withdrawal, Emotional Constriction, Inner Fantasy, Anhedonia, and Social Indifference.
You learn how strongly you tend toward isolation, withdrawal and emotional distance.
For anyone who prefers solitude and wonders how far that preference reaches.
Report and PDF $6, paid after you finish.
Your answers stay private.
It comes from personality research on social withdrawal and emotional detachment.
What this test is
Welcome. The Isolation, Withdrawal, and Detachment Scale uses 40 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Social Withdrawal, Emotional Constriction, Inner Fantasy, Anhedonia, and Social Indifference.
The measure
It has 40 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale. Its scores cover Social Withdrawal, Emotional Constriction, Inner Fantasy, Anhedonia and Social Indifference.
At a glance
What it measures
Forty statements describe a pattern of distance from others and from one's own feelings. Social Withdrawal concerns keeping apart from people and preferring to be alone; Emotional Constriction concerns feeling and showing little emotion; Inner Fantasy concerns a rich private world of imagination that can take the place of outward relationships; Anhedonia concerns reduced pleasure in ordinary experiences; and Social Indifference concerns caring little about others' praise or criticism. An overall score describes the pattern as a whole.
The pattern has a long history in psychoanalytic thought. Fairbairn (1952) described a withdrawal from relationships into an inner world, often protecting a deep need for connection that feels dangerous, and Guntrip (1969) developed this account further. Psychiatric classifications later described a narrower personality pattern centered on detachment and restricted emotion. The scale was written for this site with items from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), to describe the pattern dimensionally across its several facets.
Each dimension is scored separately and combined into an overall score. Higher scores describe a stronger tendency toward the corresponding form of distance; lower scores describe greater engagement with others and with feeling. The profile is often more revealing than the total: a person high in inner fantasy but low in indifference, for example, may value relationships more than their outward withdrawal suggests. The scale describes a personality pattern and is not a diagnosis.
The scale is used for self-understanding, in psychodynamic therapy and in research. On this site, the Revised Social Anhedonia Scale measures reduced pleasure in social contact, the Experiences in Close Relationships Short Form (ECR-SF) measures attachment avoidance, and the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) includes a Detachment domain.
How to read it
The instrument is administered by a clinician through a secure patient link rather than the open self-serve catalog. A high or low standing on any facet describes a self-reported tendency; it is not a diagnosis and does not substitute for clinical evaluation.
Subscales
Social Withdrawal 12 items
how much you prefer solitude and limit time spent with others
Emotional Constriction 8 items
how much you hold back emotional expression and keep feelings private
Inner Fantasy 6 items
how absorbed you become in your own inner world of thought and daydream
Anhedonia 7 items
how much pleasure you take from everyday activities and the senses
Social Indifference 7 items
how indifferent you are to praise, criticism, and others' opinions
Example item
“I love to chat.”
Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.
Scoring & interpretation
Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.
References
- Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public-domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde et al. (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe (Vol. 7, pp. 7–28). Tilburg University Press.
- International Personality Item Pool. A Scientific Collaboratory for the Development of Advanced Measures of Personality Traits and Other Individual Differences. https://ipip.ori.org/
Sample report preview
The report opens with a profile of your scores on the 5 scales (Social Withdrawal, Emotional Constriction, Inner Fantasy, Anhedonia, and Social Indifference), drawn on a common scale so the overall shape of the profile is visible at a glance. Each scale then receives a short plain-language explanation of what a higher or lower standing describes. It closes with guidance on reading the results and on the limits of self-report.
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Subscale scores | Your score on each of the 5 subscales. |
| Comparisons | How your scores compare with a published comparison group. |
It is free to take, and the full report with a downloadable copy is $6.
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