Editorial: Adding Measures of Emotion Dysregulation to Our Toolkits

Abstract

Emotion dysregulation is at the heart of our work with families. Learning to recognize and regulate emotions is among the most important developmental tasks. Culturally inappropriate displays of emotion are a major driver of clinical referrals for externalizing problems, but ineffective and maladaptive emotion regulation also contributes to internalizing problems; in fact, emotion dysregulation is central to most psychopathology. Given its ubiquity and importance, it is perhaps surprising that there have not been well-known and well-validated options for assessing it. That is changing. Freitag and Grassie et al.¹ conducted a systematic review of emotion dysregulation questionnaires in children and adolescents. Searching 3 databases, they scanned more than 2,000 articles, retaining more than 500 in their review, capturing 115 different instruments. They found an 8-fold increase in published research comparing the first and second decades of this millennium, and a quadrupling of the number of measures available from 30 to 115.² A recent narrative review by Althoff and Ametti³ of measures of irritability and dysregulation included several neighboring scales outside the scope of Freitag and Grassie et al.'s review.¹.