We are pleased to be able to share details of the findings of this study that was supported by the DSA.
Here is a summary of the research findings:
We have developed the Emotional Outburst Questionnaire to more closely measure outbursts or meltdowns in children and young people.
Thanks to the support from families across the globe, we received a total of 268 responses to this questionnaire. We were pleased that families of children and young people with a wide range of diagnoses could take part in this study.
We think that outbursts or meltdowns can happen for many different reasons and these reasons may be linked to the different situations that can lead to outbursts or meltdowns. In this publication, we used the questionnaire responses to find out what kinds of situations can lead to emotional outbursts or meltdowns in children and young people. This in turn helped us to hypothesise the different reasons causing outbursts or meltdowns in these kinds of situations.
We were able to divide the 268 responses into three groups, each with a distinct pattern in terms of the situations linked to outbursts or meltdowns:
- Children and young people in the first group experienced outbursts or meltdowns frequently across all types of situations. We think that outbursts or meltdowns in this group may be related to Sensory Sensitivity – children and young people in this group may have differences in sensory processing so that they may find it especially difficult to process what is happening in the surroundings and control their emotions at the same time.
- Children and young people in the second group experienced outbursts or meltdowns frequently in situations where they might feel safe (e.g., at home, with immediate family members), but not in other situations. We think that outbursts or meltdowns in this group may be related to Perceived Safety – children and young people in this group may be masking any distress they feel outside of safe situations, so that this negativity may build up and it may then be released as an outburst or meltdown when the children and young people return to a safe situation.
- Children and young people in the third group experienced outbursts or meltdowns frequently in situations where they might not feel safe (e.g., in public, in an unfamiliar place). We think that outbursts or meltdowns in this group may be related to Perceived Unsafety – children and young people in this group may have differences in safety perception so that they may find these situations particularly distressing, which may make it more difficult for children and young people to control their emotions in these situations.
The types of situations we focused on in this study are linked to what is happening in the background that may make outbursts or meltdowns more likely to happen (e.g., where a person is or who they are with). We expect that there are other background factors linked to outbursts or meltdowns that we have not identified in this study and that some children and young people may experience outbursts or meltdowns for multiple reasons (e.g., a person may have differences in sensory processing and safety perception linked to outbursts or meltdowns).
We found that some diagnoses were more associated with one group over the others, but perhaps more importantly, we found that diagnosis alone did not fully predict what situations were linked to a child or young person’s outbursts or meltdowns. Therefore, we think that it would be beneficial for future research into outbursts or meltdowns to be more inclusive in this respect to maximise the impact that the work can bring to families.
In addition to these main findings, our research highlighted that in this study, less than a quarter of families received effective support for outbursts or meltdowns. This points to a need for more accessible and more effective support for families, and we hope that this line of research can lead to the development of more targeted intervention strategies.
Finally, we emphasised the importance of appropriate language use, as families have expressed to us that terms that have commonly been used by researchers and professionals to describe emotional outbursts or meltdowns, such as “temper outbursts” or “temper tantrums”, were not appropriate. We hope that the wider research community will begin to adopt this shift to “emotional outbursts” that we have suggested in the publication, and we think that future work should focus on working with families to ensure that researchers and professionals are using the appropriate terminology.
The full article is publicly available online.
The research team have used their findings to create a parent guide on emotional outbursts or meltdowns for Cerebra, a UK charity supporting children with brain conditions. You can access the guide for free online here.
If you have any questions about this research, you can email kwrg@contacts.bham.ac.uk.