Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 28 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Emotion dysregulation is a pervasive clinical problem that likely emerges from complex Gene × Environment interactions across development. Epigenetic processes provide a molecular basis by which genotype interacts with the environment across the lifespan to produce phenotype. Epigenetics is defined by molecular processes occurring on and around the genome that regulate gene activity without changing DNA sequence. This chapter describes how epigenetic mechanisms are assessed and provides a brief review of current research on epigenetics, emotion dysregulation, and associated disorders. It then highlights four biological pathways of interest, the serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine systems and the limbic-hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (L-HPA) axis, and argues that, to advance understanding of the pathophysiology of emotion dysregulation, biological pathways rather than single genes must be measured. The chapter describes challenges for the field of epigenetics and how novel methods could be leveraged to overcome those challenges.

Keywords: emotion dysregulation, epigenetics, biological pathways, serotonin, dopamine, borderline personality disorder

Mindy Brown

Mindy Brown, BS Department of Psychology, The University of Utah

Elisabeth Conradt

Elisabeth Conradt, PhD Department of Psychology, The University of Utah

Sheila E. Crowell

Sheila E. Crowell, PhD Department of Psychology, The University of Utah

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.