Strategies for Managing Impairing Emotional Outbursts

Abstract

This Viewpoint discusses the important role pediatricians play in assessment, prevention, and early intervention for children who display impairing emotional outbursts.

A pragmatic, clinically optimized approach to characterizing adolescent irritability: Validation of parent‐ and adolescent reports on the Multidimensional Assessment Profile Scales—Temper Loss Scale

“…While irritability is considered to be normative in adolescence, elevated levels of irritability during this period have been linked to various negative outcomes in adulthood, such as depression, substance use, and poorer social and overall functioning (Copeland et al, 2014;. Furthermore, the importance of developmentally-specific measurement cannot be overstated-the phenotypic expressions of irritability vary greatly from early childhood through adolescence (Copeland et al, 2014;McClellan et al, 2023;Pine et al, 1999;Stringaris & Goodman, 2009;Wakschlag et al, 2010) and measures of irritability as transdiagnostic indicators of mental health risk are optimized when they capture this developmental variation in clinical expression in meaningful ways. Adolescence presents a peak opportunity to identify and address heightened irritability in youth before they transition to adulthood.…”

A vision for implementing equitable early mental health and resilience support in pediatric primary care: A transdiagnostic, developmental approach.

“…Advances in irritability science have paved the way for application of a transdiagnostic approach in pediatric care (Evans et al, 2023; Wakschlag et al, 2024). The central self-regulatory deficit that underlies over a dozen psychiatric disorders is difficulty with negative emotion regulation—particularly irritability—which is the most robust developmental predictor of transdiagnostic MH problems (McClellan et al, 2023). Dysregulated tantrums, the clinically-salient feature of irritability in young children, are distinguishable from the expectable tantrums of “the terrible twos” in terms of intensity, duration, frequency, etc.…”