Emotional reactivity and vulnerability: the resilience factors most closely tied to family functioning

In our article on resilience, I described how children with acquired brain injury (ABI) showed a particular pattern on the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents (RSCA): lower sense of mastery and sense of relatedness than their peers, but higher emotional reactivity and vulnerability. Of all these factors, emotional reactivity and vulnerability were the ones most strongly linked to how families were functioning overall. This article looks at what these terms mean, what my dissertation found, and why this points towards thinking about a child’s emotional responses and their family’s functioning as part of the same picture, rather than two separate things.

What we mean by ‘emotional reactivity’ and ‘vulnerability’

Within the RSCA, emotional reactivity describes how readily a child becomes upset, how intensely they react once they are, and how long it takes them to settle again afterwards (Prince-Embury, 2008). A child with high emotional reactivity might be tipped into distress by things that would not affect another child in the same way, react strongly when this happens, and take longer than expected to recover their usual mood and composure.

Vulnerability is calculated by combining high emotional reactivity with low sense of mastery. It is intended to identify children who are both easily and strongly affected by stress, and who also do not feel they have much influence over what happens to them. Prince-Embury’s model treats this combination as a marker of risk: children scoring highly on vulnerability are considered less well placed to cope with whatever comes next, whether that is an additional stressor or simply the ordinary demands of daily life.

What the research found

In my MSc dissertation, children with ABI scored significantly higher than healthy controls on both emotional reactivity and vulnerability, alongside the lower mastery and resourcefulness described in our other articles. Of the RSCA factors measured, emotional reactivity and vulnerability had the strongest associations with family functioning: higher emotional reactivity and higher vulnerability were both significantly correlated with poorer family functioning across the sample.

This pattern is consistent with wider research. A prospective cohort study by Ryan et al. (2025) followed 86 children with mild-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 43 typically developing children over one year. Children with TBI showed significantly greater problems with emotion regulation than the comparison group, and these emotion regulation problems mediated the effect of family functioning on the child’s later behavioural difficulties (Ryan et al., 2025). In other words, how a family communicates and responds to a child appears to shape that child’s emotional regulation, which in turn shapes how they go on to behave.

A two-way relationship, not a one-way street

Findings like these point away from simple explanations in either direction. It would be easy, but unhelpful, to read ‘emotional reactivity is linked to family functioning’ as meaning either that a child’s emotional difficulties are causing problems for the family, or that family difficulties are causing the child’s emotional reactivity. Ryan et al.’s (2025) findings suggest something more like a loop: family functioning affects a child’s emotion regulation, and emotion regulation affects how the family experiences and responds to the child, which feeds back into family functioning over time.

This matters because it means support aimed only at the child, for example strategies for managing emotional outbursts in isolation, is unlikely to be enough on its own. Equally, support aimed only at family communication, without attention to the child’s own emotional responses, may also fall short. Ryan et al. (2025) concluded that their findings support the value of family-centred care approaches in rehabilitation, where addressing family dynamics and a child’s emotion regulation are treated as connected goals rather than separate referrals.

What this means in practice

At Hawkley Rehab, this is part of why our case management does not treat a child’s emotional regulation and the family’s wider functioning as separate strands of work. The same case manager who is helping a family access support for managing big emotions and difficult moments is also looking at the broader picture: how the household is communicating, how parents are coping, and how the child’s sense of mastery and voice in their own rehabilitation are being supported.

None of this is about identifying blame, in either direction. A child who reacts strongly and takes time to settle is not the problem, and nor is a family that is finding communication harder than it once did. Both are part of the same picture, and both can be supported.

If you would like to talk about what this might mean for your family, please get in touch.

References

Prince-Embury, S. (2008) ‘The Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents, psychological symptoms, and clinical status in adolescents’, Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 23(1), pp. 41–56.

Ryan, N. P., Catroppa, C., Botchway, E., Sood, N. T., Crossley, L., Crowe, L., Hearps, S. and Anderson, V. (2025) ‘How does family functioning contribute to child externalizing and internalizing behavior problems after childhood TBI? Evidence from a prospective cohort study’, Journal of Affective Disorders, 374, pp. 238–246. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2025.01.023.