Why So Many People with Aphantasia Are So Hard on Themselves

Aphantasia, Anauralia, and Wellbeing: Two Missing Senses, Two Very Different Profiles

Lambert, Schelp, Quigley-Tump, Tan, Purdy & Sibley, Neuropsychologia, 2026

The Question

Most aphantasia research uses small, self-selected samples. This study used something rare: a nationally representative survey of over 32,000 New Zealanders. Researchers wanted to know how common aphantasia and anauralia actually are in the general population, and whether the two conditions are linked to different psychological profiles.

The Discovery

Out of 32,784 participants, 261 reported no visual imagery at all. That is 0.80%. Another 252 reported no auditory imagery. That is 0.77%. So roughly one in a hundred people for each. About half of those with aphantasia also had anauralia, and vice versa, but a meaningful minority had one without the other.

That split matters because the psychological profiles turned out to be quite different.

People with aphantasia reported lower personal wellbeing, lower self-esteem, more psychological distress, and stronger feelings of being an outsider compared to people with typical visual imagery. The effect sizes were small but consistent, around Glass's delta of .21 to .24. When the researchers factored in perfectionism, those differences shrank dramatically or disappeared. Aphantasics scored higher on perfectionism than controls, and perfectionism was strongly correlated with distress (r = .56), reduced wellbeing (r = .45), lower self-esteem (r = .64), and feeling like an outsider (r = .47). So the distress gap between aphantasics and typical imagers may be driven less by the absence of imagery itself and more by holding themselves to standards that feel impossible to meet.

People with anauralia showed the opposite pattern. They reported more self-control than controls, not less. Their sense of control over their own health was also higher. The researchers had predicted the reverse, expecting that absence of inner auditory experience would undermine self-regulation. It did not.

What’s a Pearson number?

It measures how closely two things move together across a group of people.

If you measured height and shoe size in a thousand people, you would find that taller people tend to have bigger feet. Not everytime, but consistently enough that the pattern shows up in the data. A Pearson correlation puts a number on how tight that pattern is.

The number runs from -1 to +1.

Close to 1 means as one thing goes up, the other tends to go up with it. Close to -1 means as one goes up, the other tends to go down. Close to 0 means no clear pattern either way.

In this study, r = .64 between perfectionism and low self-esteem means that across thousands of people, those who held themselves to higher standards and felt they kept falling short also tended to feel worse about themselves overall. Not a perfect lockstep, but a strong and consistent pattern.

What it cannot tell you is which one is driving the other, or whether something else is causing both. It just says they travel together.

The Catch

Both conditions were identified using a single survey question each, not a full imagery questionnaire. The validation data looked strong, with correlations above .90 against multi-item instruments, but the approach still relies entirely on self-report with no behavioral check. The sample skews older (mean age 54.9) and is predominantly of European descent in New Zealand, so how well these findings translate to younger populations or other cultural contexts is an open question. All findings are correlational. The study cannot tell us whether aphantasia causes distress, whether perfectionism causes it, or whether some third factor drives both.

The Insight

In this study, aphantasia and anauralia were linked to different psychological profiles. Aphantasia was associated with more distress and perfectionism, while anauralia was associated with better self-control. One reason the aphantasia finding stands out is that perfectionism seems to sit in the middle of the picture.

The pattern the researchers found goes like this. 

1. People with aphantasia tended to report higher perfectionism. 

2. People with higher perfectionism tended to report more distress and lower self-esteem. 

3. When perfectionism was taken into account, the gap between aphantasics and controls on distress became much smaller.

4. 
   

That does not prove perfectionism causes the distress. It does suggest that the distress linked to aphantasia may be tied partly to self-pressure, not imagery alone. So the distress may not come directly from the absence of imagery but tied to the experience of feeling behind or unsure without knowing why. A child who cannot visualize may keep running into tasks that feel harder than they should, get told to try harder, and start wondering what is wrong with them. Over time, that kind of experience can shape the way they judge themselves. 

Please note: This is my interpretation, not a direct claim from the paper. The study fits this idea, but it does not prove it :)

The One Thing to Remember

A student or adult with aphantasia who seems hard on themselves, frustrated by their own output, or quick to doubt their work may be showing a pattern this study found at scale. In this sample, the distress linked to aphantasia was closely related to perfectionism, not just to the absence of imagery itself. That means the useful response is not to assume the person is underperforming. It is to notice that they may be judging themselves more harshly than the situation requires.

The Connection

The guide describes a student who has absorbed years of quiet signals that something is wrong with them. This research puts numbers to that pattern. The distress, the self-esteem gap, the sense of being an outsider, all of it showed up at a population level and all of it tracked with perfectionism. The guide's core argument is that naming the difference explains the past without shrinking the future. This study suggests that may be exactly the right order of operations, because the damage appears to accumulate not from the absence of imagery itself, but from spending years measuring yourself against a standard that was never built for your brain.

The Source

You can read the full paper by clicking here.