• Emotional Dysregulation
• Adolescents
• Autonomic Nervous System
• Biological Correlates
• Clinical Assessment

The failure to regulate one’s own emotions, that is Emotional Dysregulation (ED), has become a diagnostic challenge in the last decades with a great heterogeneity of presentations, and has been recently considered a core dimension of psychopathology in youths in a transnosographic conceptualization. In light of this, clinicians should always detect the presence of ED when dealing with challenging adolescents by means of several validated clinical measures, including, among others, the RIPoSt-Y questionnaire. Along with these, peripheral indexes of functioning of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity emerged as reliable transdiagnostic biomarkers of psychopathology, since arousal has been frequently found to be dysregulated in individuals with ED. For these reasons, the present research project was first aimed to systematically review the currently available literature investigating the ANS correlates of ED. Secondly, we attempted to characterize the clinical profile of a cohort of patients with ED. Then, a novel parent-rated measure of emotional reactivity, the REACT questionnaire, was developed and validated in a mixed sample of patients with ED and healthy adolescents. Moreover, we aimed to identify the ANS functioning correlates of affective reactivity to emotionally salient videoclips in a stimulation protocol conducted on a clinical sample of youths. Finally, a longitudinal cohort study aimed at assessing changes in ANS activity after drug treatment for ED in adolescence was designed and is currently ongoing to identify biological predictors of clinical response to pharmacological interventions.