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Emotion Dysregulation Among Adolescents with Borderline Personality Disorder

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Handbook of Borderline Personality Disorder in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Emotion dysregulation encompasses a broad range of difficulties related to emotional experience and modulation. The term emotion dysregulation has been applied to problems with the intensity, frequency and duration of emotional responses, as well difficulties modulating emotional experiences in effective and adaptive ways (Bloch, Moran & Kring, 2010). Emotion dysregulation appears in many theoretical accounts of the pathogenesis and phenomenology of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It has been suggested that facets of emotion dysregulation are observable during childhood and adolescence, prior to the emergence of BPD, and that adolescents with BPD symptomatology experience greater emotion dysregulation than their peers (Crowell et al., 2010). Despite recent empirical efforts to characterize the relationship between emotion dysregulation and borderline symptomatology among adolescents, many questions remain unanswered about the role of emotion dysregulation in the development of BPD, as well as the nature and extent of emotion dysregulation among adolescents who have BPD. The goal of this chapter is to review current research that addresses the relationship between emotion dysregulation and borderline personality disorder among adolescents and young adults between the ages of 10-24.

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Matusiewicz, A., Weaverling, G., Lejuez, C.W. (2014). Emotion Dysregulation Among Adolescents with Borderline Personality Disorder. In: Sharp, C., Tackett, J. (eds) Handbook of Borderline Personality Disorder in Children and Adolescents. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0591-1_13

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