Emotional Dysregulation

Emotion Dysregulation

Emotion dysregulation is the inability, even when one’s best efforts are applied, to change or regulate emotional cues, experiences, actions, verbal responses, and/or nonverbal expressions under normative conditions. Pervasive emotion dysregulation is seen when the inability to regulate emotions occurs across a wide range of emotions, adaptation problems, and situational contexts.

Pervasive emotion dysregulation is due to vulnerability to high emotionality, together with an inability to regulate intense emotion-linked responses. Characteristics of emotion dysregulation include an excess of painful emotional experiences; an inability to regulate intense arousal; problems turning attention away from emotional cues; cognitive distortions and failures in information processing; insufficient control of impulsive behaviors related to strong positive and negative affect; difficulties organizing and coordinating activities to achieve non-mood-dependent goals during emotional arousal; and a tendency to “freeze” or dissociate under very high stress. It can also present as emotion overcontrol and suppression, which leads to pervasive negative affect, low positive affect, an inability to up-regulate emotions, and difficulty with affective communication. Systemic dysregulation is produced by emotional vulnerability and by maladaptive and inadequate emotion modulation strategies.

Emotional vulnerability is defined by these characteristics:

           (1) very high negative affectivity as a baseline,

           (2) sensitivity to emotional stimuli,

           (3) intense response to emotional stimuli, and

           (4) slow return to emotional baseline once emotional arousal has occurred.

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