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DATE: August 22, 2026 at 07:00AM
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-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The “sense of absence” may explain why disconnected teens turn to addictive behaviors
Recent psychological research provides evidence that adolescents who feel emotionally detached and unnoticed by others may be more likely to engage in addictive behaviors as a way to cope. A newly developed psychological scale allows scientists to measure this subjective sense of absence, which appears to act as a bridge connecting poor family communication to various addictions. These findings were recently published in two separate papers in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health.
Yaniv Efrati, head of the Addictive Behaviors Lab at Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Education, and Marc N. Potenza of Yale University wanted to better understand why some teenagers turn to the internet, substances, or repetitive behaviors to manage their emotions. Existing psychological concepts like loneliness or emptiness describe isolation or a lack of meaning in life, but the researchers suspected something deeper might be occurring.
“Much of the research on adolescent addictive behaviors focuses on specific risk factors and asks what makes some young people more vulnerable than others,” Efrati said. “As a researcher, I found myself asking a somewhat different question: Is there a more fundamental subjective experience that might help us understand what lies behind adolescents’ involvement in addictive behaviors?”
This specific feeling is known as a sense of absence. It describes a state in which a young person might feel like they are watching their own life from the outside or struggling to participate in daily activities. “It describes an experience that has both an internal and an interpersonal dimension,” Efrati explained. “Internally, an adolescent may experience a sense of emptiness, inner disconnection, or the feeling that something important is missing, even when it is difficult to identify exactly what that is.”
The interpersonal aspect involves adolescents feeling misunderstood or unseen by the people who matter most. “An adolescent can feel that something is missing within while simultaneously feeling that others do not really see or understand them,” Efrati said. “I wanted to examine whether this broader experience of absence might be meaningfully connected to adolescents’ relationships with significant others and, at the same time, to their involvement in different addictive behaviors.”
To explore this, Efrati and Potenza designed their initial study to create a reliable way to measure this complex emotional state. They developed a new questionnaire called the Sense of Absence Scale. They recruited a sample of 1,555 adolescents from the general community in Israel, ranging in age from 14 to 18 years old. The participants completed the newly designed 14-item survey alongside established questionnaires measuring online addictions, loneliness, emptiness, mental pain, hope, and suicidal thoughts.
The researchers found that the new scale functioned very well across different genders and religious backgrounds. The scale successfully captured a unique emotional experience that overlapped with, yet remained distinct from, general psychological distress. For instance, the sense of absence scale shared about 59 percent of its statistical variance with feelings of emptiness and 42 percent with mental pain.
The researchers initially expected the results to closely mirror established psychological concepts. “What surprised me most was the way the Sense of Absence emerged as a distinct psychological construct,” Efrati said. “When we first began conceptualizing the construct and developing the questionnaire with Prof. Marc Potenza from Yale University, we assumed that it would largely reflect a combination of experiences we already know well, particularly emptiness, psychological pain, and loneliness.”
Instead, the data revealed a unique blend of internal and interpersonal detachment. “However, both the theoretical development and the statistical findings suggested something broader and more coherent,” Efrati said. “The Sense of Absence captures not only an internal experience of emptiness or disconnection, but also an important interpersonal experience: the feeling that I am not truly seen, understood, or emotionally recognized by the people around me.”
Previous research tends to treat loneliness and emptiness as separate experiences. “The Sense of Absence appears to bring together the internal feeling that ‘something is missing in me’ with the relational feeling that ‘others do not really see me,'” Efrati noted. “The fact that these experiences formed a coherent construct in their own right was one of the findings that surprised us most.”
Higher scores on this new scale aligned with higher levels of problematic online behaviors, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts, while indicating lower levels of hope and self-compassion.
Using this validated tool, Efrati conducted a larger follow-up study to map out exactly how this emotional state fits into a teenager’s broader psychological world. This study involved 2,564 adolescents from the general Israeli community with an average age of about 16 years. Participants completed online questionnaires assessing their sense of absence, attachment styles, and the quality of their communication with their parents.
The participants also reported on a wide variety of addictive behaviors. These included alcohol and drug use, problem gambling, shopping addiction, internet gaming disorder, problematic social media use, smartphone addiction, problematic pornography use, and compulsive sexual behavior. Efrati used a statistical technique called network analysis to map how all these different psychological and behavioral variables interact with one another in a complex web.
Network analysis allows scientists to visualize which factors act as central hubs connecting different clusters of behavior. The results indicated that the sense of absence held the most central and influential position in the entire psychological network. Its influence score was about 7.8 percent higher than the second-most influential factor, which was problematic social media use.
The analysis grouped the sense of absence together with relational factors, such as attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and parent-adolescent communication. These social and family dynamics formed one distinct cluster in the network. The addictive behaviors formed separate clusters, with online addictions grouping together and substance or impulse-based addictions forming another group.
The sense of absence acted as the strongest bridge connecting the family and relational cluster to the various addiction clusters. The direct links between poor parent-adolescent communication and addictive behaviors were relatively sparse and weak. Instead, the data suggests that poor communication and insecure attachments relate strongly to a sense of absence, which in turn relates to engagement in addictive behaviors.
In this network, the sense of absence showed stronger mathematical associations with relational factors than it did directly with the addictions.
“The main takeaway is that when we think about addictive behaviors in adolescence, we should look beyond the behavior itself and ask what the young person may be experiencing underneath it,” Efrati told PsyPost. “Findings suggest that a sense of inner emptiness, feeling unseen by others, and difficulty feeling meaningfully connected may be important parts of the broader picture.”
This internal void might make a teenager more vulnerable to seeking out the temporary stimulation or relief provided by addictive habits. “This does not mean that feeling unseen causes addiction, and the study cannot establish that kind of causal relationship,” Efrati noted.
“For parents, teachers, and professionals, the message may therefore be quite simple: alongside asking what an adolescent is doing, how much they are using a smartphone, gaming, drinking, or engaging in other potentially addictive behaviors, it may also be important to ask how they are feeling in their relationships. Sometimes understanding the experience surrounding the behavior may tell us something important that focusing on the behavior alone does not reveal.”
Building stronger family connections could offer a protective effect against these behaviors. “When discussing the prevention of addictive behaviors among adolescents, we often focus on screen time, gaming, substance use, or setting limits,” Efrati explained. “These are important, but our findings suggest another question: What might the adolescent be seeking through this behavior? Parenting is not only about supervision, but also about being present, listening, and creating a relationship in which adolescents feel seen, heard, and significant.”
The cross-sectional design of both studies only captures data at a single point in time, meaning the research cannot determine the exact sequence of events. “The main caveat is that this was a cross-sectional study, so we cannot determine causality or the direction of the associations,” Efrati said. “Although the network analysis identifies meaningful connections among relational experiences, Sense of Absence, and addictive behaviors, longitudinal research is needed to understand how these relationships develop over time.”
Another limitation is that the new survey does not specify exactly who the teenager feels absent from. A teenager might feel invisible to their parents but highly valued by their friends, and the current questionnaire does not separate these distinct social relationships. The scale also lacks established clinical cutoffs, meaning mental health professionals cannot yet use it to definitively diagnose a specific level of impairment.
Future research will need to test the survey in different cultural contexts and age groups outside of Israel. “Our next step is to examine the Sense of Absence longitudinally and understand how it develops across adolescence and relates to changes in addictive behaviors, including both online addictive behaviors and substance use,” Efrati said.
“More broadly, this research offers another perspective on adolescent addiction: beyond asking how much time adolescents spend online, whether they use substances, or what behaviors they engage in, we may also need to ask what they are experiencing underneath these behaviors and whether they feel connected, present, and truly seen in their relationships. Ultimately, we hope this perspective can inform prevention efforts that strengthen adolescents’ sense of connection and belonging.”
The study, ““Feeling unseen”: Generation and psychometric validation of a scale assessing sense of absence,” was authored by Yaniv Efrati and Marc N. Potenza.
The study, “Filling the void: sense of absence as a comprehensive bridge between attachment, parent–adolescent communication, and addictive behaviors among adolescents,” was authored by Yaniv Efrati.
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