Clinical and Biological Correlates of Emotional Dysregulation in Children and Adolescents: A Transdiagnostic Approach to Developmental Psychopathology

Dear Colleagues,

Emotion regulation may be defined as the ability to regulate behavioral and physiological reactivity to sensory stimuli and environmental situations. It entails any kind of strategy aiming to monitor, assess, and modulate emotions in the context of different conditions. On the other hand, the failure to regulate one’s own emotions, that is, emotional dysregulation (ED), has become a diagnostic challenge in the last several decades with a great heterogeneity of clinical presentations and different proposed definitions of the construct, and has been recently considered a core dimension of psychopathology in youths in a transnosographic conceptualization. In childhood and adolescence, it affects at least 1–6% of the general population, and significantly and negatively impacts school functioning and professional outcome, social adjustment and acceptability by peers, and current and later quality of life. For these reasons, ED represents a highly relevant construct in psychiatry research and clinical practice in terms of developmental outcomes and prognostic implications. In light of this, clinicians should always detect the presence of ED when dealing with challenging children and adolescents by means of several validated clinical measures. Along with these, neurofunctional findings based on brain imaging techniques and peripheral indexes of functioning of the autonomic nervous system have recently emerged as reliable transdiagnostic biomarkers of ED in psychopathology.

The principal aim of this Special Issue is to address five major points of ED in youths:

• Etiology, early precursors and developmental trajectories;
• Clinical presentations of ED and related constructs (affective lability, irritability, etc.);
• Neurobiological and psychophysiological correlates of emotion processing and regulation;
• Clinical assessment and management including neuropsychological evaluation;
• Psychosocial interventions, psychotherapy and pharmacological treatment options.

Special attention will be given to original research, especially for randomized clinical trials and empirical studies, but systematic reviews and meta-analyses will also be welcomed.

Dr. Annarita Milone
Dr. Gianluca Sesso
Guest Editors

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• emotional dysregulation
• affective lability
• irritability
• transdiagnostic dimension
• children
• adolescents
• youth