Psychological Science Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-8-2024
Abstract
Objectives: One of the behavioral problems strongly associated with emotional dysregulation (ED) in ASD is emotional outbursts (EOs) characterized by a pattern of challenging behavior that varies across individuals and across time. Cultural factors can modulate the expression of EOs. This study aimed to characterize the profile of emotional outbursts (EOs) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across various countries in Latin America and to identify clinical, emotional, and contextual factors that contribute to the onset and frequency of EOs within this diverse sample. Methods: A cross-sectional and cross-cultural study was conducted between 2023 and 2024 comprising samples from five countries in the Latin American Network for Autism-REAL: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic. We studied 689 children with ASD (age x = 8.7 ± 2.6 years) using the Emotional Outburst Questionnaire (EOQ). Results: We identified different types of EO among children with ASD in our sample. The most frequent was the ‘behavioral indicators of emotion’ (52.0%) followed by ‘increased motor activity’ (28.3%), ‘non-speech vocalizations’, (27.6%), ‘mild verbal aggression’ (23.8%), and ‘avoidance’ (21.5%). Children in a bad mood or having a bad day or experiencing irritability were the most significant factors that increased the likelihood of EOs. Conclusions: Our results revealed that irritability is an important trigger for EOs and should not be disregarded or underestimated when monitoring the mental health of children with ASD.
Recommended Citation
Teixeira, M. C. T. V., Lowenthal, R., Rattazzi, A., Cukier, S., Valdez, D., Garcia, R., ... & Paula, C. S. (2024). Understanding Emotional Outbursts: A Cross-Cultural Study in Latin American Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Brain Sciences, 14(10), 1010. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14101010
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Brain Sciences
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14101010
Comments
© 2024 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).