AFFECTIVE LABILITY: SYMPTOMS, CAUSES AND DISEASES - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The affective lability is a psychological state characterized by mood instability. People with this disorder usually have frequent changes in their mood; it does not constitute a disease or a psychological disorder in itself. Rather, it is considered as a symptom or a certain psychic state.

Affective lability can appear related to a psychiatric disorder, although it is not always part of a psychopathology. When it is a manifestation of a disease, it can be more serious. However, regardless of the associated symptoms or the underlying pathology, it usually causes discomfort in the person.

Individuals who present affective lability tend to have high difficulties in maintaining a stable and satisfactory state of mind, a fact that causes an alteration of the psychological state and a notable decrease in their quality of life.

Characteristics of affective lability

Affective lability refers to experiencing frequent or intense mood swings. It is an occasional alteration that is not experienced continuously.

However, people with affective lability often have frequent changes in their mood. For example, they may go from feeling happy or euphoric to feeling depressed or down.

These mood swings can be motivated by both external and internal stimuli. A conversation with a friend, the receipt of news, the appearance of a certain thought, the elaboration of a memory…

All these aspects can generate a notable change in the person's mood, so that affective lability is explained through an excess of susceptibility of the individual towards a wide range of elements.

Likewise, in order to detect the presence of affective lability, it is important to specify the intensity or severity of the mood.

All people experience, more or less frequently, certain fluctuations in mood. During the day, multiple situations can arise that affect the mood and that motivate the appearance of specific feelings and emotions.

However, both the intensity and the frequency of affective lability are much higher than would be expected. People with this disorder alter their mood too often or too intensely.

In addition, affective lability usually has a negative impact on the personal and, above all, social functioning of individuals.

Recurring mood swings can significantly affect the quality of relationships you establish with those close to you, causing frequent arguments, loss of friends and relationship problems.

Symptoms

Affective lability encompasses a wide set of alterations in the manifestation of affectivity and emotional state.

Normally, people with affective lability are able to interpret the reasons for the symptoms. In other words, if an individual begins to cry uncontrollably, she interprets said emotional alteration as a consequence of an experience or an occasional state.

However, this is not always the case, so that subjects with affective lability may also begin to experience intense emotional sensations without being able to correctly interpret the cause of the disturbance.

At present, there is no specific symptomatic classification of affective lability. However, it is maintained that any intense and frequently changing emotional manifestation can be associated with this alteration.

In this sense, the symptoms that seem to be more frequent in affective lability are:

-Experimentation of frequent crying in isolation, without presenting a permanently depressed mood.

-Experimenting inappropriate laughter in isolation, without permanently presenting an excessively high mood.

-State of irritability or excitement of short duration and that disappears completely with the passage of time.

-Experimenting feelings of sadness occasionally, which are expressed through behavior or communication with close people.

-Experimentation of temporary feelings of joy that modify the normal behavior of the person for a certain period of time.

Causes

The causes of affective lability can be very diverse. In fact, at present there are no studies that demonstrate the presence of main factors of the alteration, so the etiology may vary in each case.

In general, it is argued that some factors could play an especially important role in the development of affective lability. These are:

Classical conditioning

Several authors affirm that the experimentation of traumatic events has a high capacity to affect the emotional development of people.

In this sense, the suffering of one or more traumas can motivate the appearance of affective lability and deteriorate the person's mood.

Personality traits

Emotional stability is an aspect that is closely related to the character and personality of the individual.

In this way, having developed in unstable environments, with affective deficiencies or emotional disorders can give rise to the constitution of personality traits vulnerable to affective lability.

Likewise, multiple studies have shown a strong correlation between borderline personality disorder and affective lability.

Related diseases

Finally, affective lability is a typical and frequent symptom of a wide range of psychic and physical pathologies.

Suffering from this alteration does not imply the presence of any mental disorder or disorder, however, it is common for many psychopathological alterations to present affective lability in their symptoms.

The main diseases that are associated with affective lability are:

1. Multiple sclerosis
2. Head trauma
3. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
4. Anorexy
5. Acute pyelonephritis
6. Premenstrual syndrome
7. Alzheimer's disease
8. Stroke
9. Depression
10. Learning difficulties
11. Cerebrovascular disease
12. Enuresis
13. Schizophrenia
14. Insomnia
15. Anxiety disorder
16. Irritable bowel syndrome
17. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

References

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2. Cichetti, D., Ackerman, BP, and Izard, CE (1995). Emotions and emotion regulation in developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 7, 1-10.
3. Keenan, K. (2000). Emotion dysregulation as a risk factor for child psychopathology. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 7 (4), 418-434.
4. Language, L. (2003). Associations among emotionality, self-regulation, adjustment problems and positive adjustment in middle childhood. Applied Developmental Psychology, 24, 595-618.
5. Linacre JM. Optimizing rating scale category effectiveness. J Appl Meas. 2002; 3 (1): 85-106.