title: The assessment of mood and affect in developmentally disabled children and adolescents: the Emotional Disorders Rating Scale.
abstract: There is an unmet need for a reliable method of evaluating disorders of mood and affect in developmentally disabled children and adolescents. Such a measure is required for both accurate diagnosis and treatment monitoring in this population. An extensive review of existing assessment techniques confirms that: (a) current techniques for the evaluation of emotional disorders in cognitively normal individuals are inappropriate for most children with developmental disabilities; and (b) current instruments designed for the assessment of developmentally disabled children pay inadequate attention to affective symptoms. In this paper, the preliminary version of a new instrument, the "Emotional Disorders Rating Scale for Developmental Disabilities" (EDRS-DD), designed to evaluate mood and affect in children and adolescents with developmental disabilities, is presented. A pilot study indicates that interrater agreement is good.
mesh_terms: D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000523:psychology*; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011594:Psychometrics