The growth of psychological self-regulation takes place between birth and early adulthood. Children at risk for substance use disorder (SUD) show deficits on tests measuring executive cognitive functions (ECF). Youth at greatly increased risk have shown affect dysregulation evidenced by susceptibility to emotional arousal, irritability, negative affect, difficult temperament, and anxiety. Behavioral characteristics indicative of dysregulation are also more common in youth at risk for SUD. The purpose of this study was to develop a prototype of a multi-informant (self, parent, teacher) and multi-trait (affect, behavior, cognition) instrument to measure psychological dysregulation. The development of the DI was performed in three stages: 1) meetings were held among a panel of child/adolescent psychologists to obtain a consensus on the characteristics that comprise dysregulation (affect, behavior, cognition); 2) the DI was administered to 251 subjects; and 3) psychometric analyses were conducted following the accumulation of the data. The results showed that DI had a satisfactory to superior internal consistency, and validity was observed for the self-report, teacher-report, and parent-report versions of the DI. The scores on the DI distinguished youth who were at high risk and low average risk to SUD, which was determined on the basis of parental SUD. In addition, the score on the DI at age 10-12 accounted for a large proportion of the variance on substance use at age 12-14, which pointed to its predictive value. The DI score also covaried with SUD severity in a sample of female adolescents. These findings show that DI may be helpful in the detection of youth at high risk for SUD. Tables, references