Chapter 18.Emotional Dyscontrol
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Excerpt
Emotional dyscontrol refers to a category of disorders in which the cardinal feature is impairment of the ability to regulate moment-to-moment emotion or affect (Arciniegas and Wortzel 2014). Emotional dyscontrol manifests as unpredictable and rapidly changing emotions that are excessively intense relative to the emotional salience of the stimulus that incites them and not amenable to full voluntary control. Examples of emotional dyscontrol include pathological laughing and crying (PLC, also known as pseudobulbar affect [PBA] or emotional incontinence), affective lability, and irritability. Although emotional dyscontrol is not specific to traumatic brain injury (TBI), it occurs among persons with TBI with sufficient frequency and clinical import to be an important focus of clinical evaluation and treatment (Arciniegas and Wortzel 2014; Hammond et al. 2014, 2018).
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