Irritability characteristics and parameters in an international sample

Abstract

Background: Irritability is a symptom of fifteen psychiatric disorders and is widely known to scholars and the public. However, little is known about irritability as an individual construct. The purpose of the current study is to identify conceptualizations of specific characteristics of irritability.

Methods: In this study, 402 participants from 10 countries answered nine qualitative questions about their personal causes, experience, and consequences of irritability as well as how they perceived the relationship between irritability and anger. They also answered three quantitative questions about the frequency, intensity, and duration of their irritability.

Results: Results indicated that 99.3% of participants reported a lifetime incidence of irritability. On average, participants reported feeling irritable approximately one to two times per week for 30 min with an intensity that was somewhat bothersome. Women reported feeling irritable for a longer duration than men, and residents of China, Singapore, and the USA generally reported having a longer duration than residents of Ireland and the UK. Some themes that appeared unique to irritability were the physiological/biological/internal aspects of irritability and treatments that address emotional and physiological coping such as relaxation and recreation.

Limitations: Many participants equated irritability with anger, and generalizations by countries should be interpreted with caution due to a small sample within each country.

Conclusions: These findings support the conceptualization of irritability as a universal construct. It is recommended that future research continue to explore irritability to better help understand it as an independent construct in the context of diagnosis, assessment, research, and treatment.

Keywords: Culture; International; Irritability; Parameters; Qualitative; Transdiagnostic.