Irritability is a psychological tendency to become angry easily or frequently, reflecting a lowered threshold for experiencing anger rather than simply having occasional anger. While everyone experiences anger from time to time, irritability refers to being more prone to anger than others, and it can often lead to significant difficulties in everyday life, including in children. It is important to know that irritability does not mean that someone is being aggressive. A person who is highly irritable may feel annoyed, easily frustrated, angry in turn, or fed up without hitting, fighting, or becoming physically aggressive. Aggression can be said to be the behavioral consequence of anger, but not necessarily of irritability. Aggression is behavior that occurs when someone is very angry or when the intensity of anger is high, whereas irritability is the tendency to become angry easily. One can say that if anger is an emotion, irritability is the tendency or mood in which the person is more likely to experience anger. Anger can be called a feeling (emotion) whereas irritability can be said to be an affect or mood state.
Types of Irritability
There are two types of irritability: phasic irritability and tonic irritability.
- Phasic irritability means sudden episodes or outbursts of anger. It involves a rapid onset of angry affect and associated behaviors, typically in response to identifiable environmental triggers such as frustration.
- Tonic irritability means persistently staying irritable or angry in mood between those outbursts. It captures longer-lasting but less intense grouchiness, crankiness, and annoyance in between outbursts.
Why Frustration Produces Irritability
Frustration can be said to be the result of not getting a reward or something a person wants. In psychological terms, frustration occurs when an individual performs an act in the expectation of a reward and does not receive it, or attempts to avoid a punishment yet still receives it. Irritability is commonly defined as a lowered threshold or proneness to anger in response to blocked goal attainment and frustrative situations. As noted above, frustration occurs when an individual’s progress toward a goal is blocked, which can trigger the irritable mood or angry outbursts characteristic of irritability.
