Turkish Validation of the Oxford Depression Questionnaire: Psychometric and Clinical Evidence Across Healthy,...

Emotional blunting is a clinically significant yet often under-recognized alteration in emotional experience, characterized by reduced intensity of both positive and negative emotions, diminished emotional responsiveness, and impaired interpersonal engagement. First described through patients' reports of antidepressant treatment, it is now recognized as associated with both depressive illness and pharmacological treatment, underscoring the need for its direct assessment. However, no validated Turkish-language instrument specifically designed to assess emotional blunting is currently available. The present study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the Oxford Depression Questionnaire (ODQ) in 272 participants comprising healthy controls, drug-naïve patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), and medicated patients with MDD in remission. Confirmatory factor analysis using WLSMV estimation broadly supported the proposed four-factor structure, although fit indices were not uniform. The correlated four-factor model provided a better fit than alternative one-factor, two-factor, and second-order models, although the second-order model showed only a modest decrement in fit. The scale demonstrated acceptable to high internal consistency across dimensions, and measurement invariance analyses supported loading invariance across the three groups. ODQ scores differed significantly between groups and showed the expected associations with depressive symptom severity and with emotional reactivity and empathy, which were themselves largely independent. These findings provide evidence for the reliability and validity of the Turkish ODQ and support its use for assessing emotional blunting across healthy, untreated, and remitted medicated populations, while indicating that further evaluation of specific items is warranted in future validation studies.