Using Stimulants to Treat ADHD-Related Emotional Lability

Emotional lability, or sudden strong shifts in emotion, commonly occurs in youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Although these symptoms are impairing and disruptive, relatively little research has addressed their treatment, likely due to the difficulty of reliable and valid assessment. Promising signals for symptom improvement have come from recent studies using stimulants in adults, children and adolescents. Similarly, neuroimaging studies have begun to identify neurobiological mechanisms underlying stimulants’ impact on emotion regulation capacities. Here, we review these recent clinical and neuroimaging findings, as well as neurocognitive models for emotional lability in ADHD, issues of relevance to prescribers and the important role of psychiatric comorbidity with treatment choices.