What is Emotional Lability: Causes, Symptoms, Risk Factors, Complications

What is Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence?

Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is a consequence of interruption to the brain signals. Brain tissues can be damaged due to specific neurological illnesses or due to brain damage/injuries. Injured brain tissues cause disengagement between the sections of the brain which convey emotions and those that manage emotions.

What is Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence?

Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence means a neurologic disorder and its characteristics are sudden uncontrollable and unintentional crying or laughing or other uncontrollable emotional outbursts. Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence takes place because of a neurologic syndrome or a brain injury. Furthermore it is possible to change elements of the brain to normalize or control emotional performance by means of an acquired brain injury.

Patients with Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence cry or laugh hysterically even for some simple things/situations and they are not capable to bring to an end to that emotion for several minutes. Dissimilar temper incidents, angry feelings or frustrations may also be a reason for a patient to either to cry or laugh uncontrollably.

Overstated changes in feelings, if the feelings of an individual are rapidly changing even because of simple situations, if a person tends to laugh or cry unmanageably, more often it could be Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence.

What is the Laughing Disease?

If a person is suffering from dementia, traumatic brain injury, stroke or MS (multiple sclerosis) and if he has the signs of nonstop crying or laughing there is a high possibility that he is suffering from Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence. Most of the Americans nearly about 2 million with definite neurological diseases are suffering from Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence which is sometimes referred to as laughing disease.

What are the Differences Between Emotional Lability / Incontinence and Depression?

Sometimes Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is misdiagnosed as clinical depression, but there are many obvious distinctions separating them.

Crying is naturally an indication of sadness in depression and in sorrow conditions, whereas in Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence pathological demonstrations of crying take place in contrast to original mood or importantly in addition of the frame of mind or eliciting encouragement.

Another important key to the discrimination between depression and Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is duration. In depression, crying is a prolonged appearance and strongly connected to the original condition of frame of mind, whereas Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence incidents are sudden and happening in short periodic manner.

The intensity of control of crying occurrence is different in depression and in Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is also different. In depression, emotional expressions specially crying can be adapted by the situation that means it could be controlled. Whereas in Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence controlling the crying/ laughing episodes is impossible.

In the same way in depression the activation for incident of weeping in patients motivates to the temper related condition, but in Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence trigger for weeping incidents may be imprecise, minimal or improper to the situation.

In certain cases, depressed frame of mind and Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence may co-exist. In reality depression considered to be one of the generally frequent emotional transform in patients through neurodegenerative syndrome or post-stroke follow-up. Depression is different from Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence and in some cases both can occur.

What Causes Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence?

Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence takes place when an injury to the section of the brain is damaged which manages:

  • Understanding of emotions of self and others.
  • Capability to manage how emotional sensations are expressed. The capability to slow down or stop sensations outcome.

If an individual has the problem of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence, feelings can be beyond relative amount to the state of affairs or surrounding where the person is. For instance, a person may shed tears, yet they are not sad – just in reply to powerful emotions or feelings they may cry, or else it may happen unexpectedly without any kind of notice.

On the appearance of these powerful emotions someone may have modest control, and these emotions need not be associated with any precise event or person. Someone might control their emotions in state of affairs where until they had the problem of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence, have been intelligent to have control in silent places like in church or when listening to a musical performance.

These types of behaviors could be puzzling, discomforting and not easy to recognize by the person with Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence and even for others.

Emotional Reaction After an Injury

Emotional response may be suitable in the circumstances, although the behavior or illustration might be tough, or remain longer than this may not be effective for that individual. For instance someone might be honestly joyful, but when the cheerfulness has started it may be incapable to discontinue or adjust the behavior like laughing too loud, for too long or too much.

An individual might also show tremendous but indisputable emotional responses following a brain injury. However those emotions may include sorrow, heartache, depression, disturbance and irritability, annoyance, nervousness, and even delight, happiness and enjoyment. These possibly will be appropriate and usual standard emotional responses.

Major Causes of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence:

  • Subsequent Conditions: Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is most frequently experiential in people who have faced neurologic injuries like TBI (traumatic brain injury) or a stroke, diseases like Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis (MS), PANDAS in adults and children, Lyme disease, Parkinson’s disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and also it has been noticed as an indication of hyperthyrodism, hypothyroidism, Graves’ Disease, or in blend with depression.
  • Brain Disorders: Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence has moreover been experiential in connection with assortment of additional brain conditions including wilson’s disease, brain tumors, syphilitic pseudobulbar palsy, as well as diverse encephalitides. Rarer situations linked with Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence include central pontine myelinolysis, dacrystic epilepsy, lipid storage diseases, gelastic epilepsy, olivopontinocerebellar atrophy, chemical exposure (e.g., nitrous oxide, insecticides), angelman syndrome and fou rire prodromique.
  • Brain Stroke: Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is one out of many generally often accounted post-stroke behavioral conditions with a choice of accounted occurrence rates from 28 percent to 52 percent. The higher occurrence rates are likely to be accounted in patients who had strokes and who are older and who have a record of prior stroke. The association between post-stroke sadness and Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence is complex, because the depressive conditions also happen with high rate in stroke survivors.
  • ALS or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: One research planned specifically to review for occurrences found that 49 percent of patients who are suffering from ALS- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis also had Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence. It is an indication of ALS that several patients are ignorant of and not getting information on by their physician.
  • MS or Multiple Sclerosis: Latest studies propose that roughly 10% of patients who have MS (multiple sclerosis) will go through at least one incident of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence.

What are the Signs and Symptoms of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence?

Individuals with Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence show signs of episodes of laughter and/or howling/crying with no obvious inspiring motivation or in reply to incentive that would not have obtained such an expressive response before the problem of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence.

In a number of patients, the emotional reaction is overstated in concentration but is motivated by an incentive with an emotive valence harmonizing with the quality of the exciting display. For example, a depressing stimulus incites a rigorous crying as an alternative of a moan, which the patient in general would have shown signs of in that meticulous.

On the other hand, in several other patients, the nature of the emotional exhibit can be different with, and yet differing to, the expressive valence of the annoying incentive or may be provoked by an incentive with no apparent behavior. For instance, a patient might laugh in reaction to sad newscast or cry in reply to incentive with no touching feeling, or, once motivated, the episodes may change from smiling to weeping or vice versa.

The signs of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence could be serious, with consistent and chronic episodes. Characteristics include:

  • The commencement can be abrupt and random, and has been illustrated by a number of patients as approaching on like an attack;
  • The incidents have a typical period of seconds to not many minutes.
  • The incident may happen many times a day.

Patients state that their occurrences are at paramount only incompletely agreeable to intentional control, and if not they feel a rigorous change of mental condition, they frequently have imminent into their difficulty and estimate their expressive display as unfitting and out of nature. The medical influence of Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence can be critical, with chronic and lasting signs that can be immobilizing to patients, and might considerably influence condition of living for caregivers.

What are the Risk Factors for Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence?

Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence has a great impact on the patients’ social and personal life. Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence can have a major impact on persons’ community functioning and their associations with other individuals. Such unexpected, regular, unmanageable emotional explosions may lead to communal retraction and interfere with actions of daily living, communal and professional activities, and have a harmful impact on complete healthcare.

For instant, patients with Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence and multiple sclerosis are often usual. On the other hand, the arrival of unmanageable emotions is generally connected with many further neurological syndromes for example, attention discrepancy hyperactivity disorder, cerebral palsy, parkinson’s disease, autism, migraines and epilepsy. This might lead to critical awkwardness and prevention of social connections to patients, which in order has an influence on their personal and their occupational life.

What are the Complications Involved in Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence?

The consequences for Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence victims incorporate thoughts of emotional tiredness and, often, communal separation. Without understanding that they possess a medical condition, people with Emotional Lability or Emotional Incontinence often change their lives to keep away from things that activate the situations, including working together with others except they definitely have to. With communal separation comes more damaging emotions that can eventually obvious as major depression.

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Team PainAssist
Team PainAssist
Written, Edited or Reviewed By: Team PainAssist, Pain Assist Inc. This article does not provide medical advice. See disclaimer
Last Modified On:May 25, 2017

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