On the Interplay of Environment, Epigenetics, and Self-Regulation in the Development of Mental Disorders: Multi-Level Adaptive Dynamical System Analysis
摘要
This volume addresses several emerging realities in psychopathology research, namely that dynamic models are needed, that environmental factors and genotype-environment interplay are important and may be related to biological mechanisms that involve epigenetic changes of gene expression. This combination introduces the possibility of formally modelling dynamical processes of gene-environment interplay in mental disorder. This volume first provides a conceptual framework to justify dynamic modelling of epigenetic and self-regulatory effects in psychopathology, and then introduces a first multidisciplinary computational approach to computationally model, formalise, and analyse the interplay of environment and epigenetics in the development of mental disorders. This chapter summarizes the five levels or units of control explained in chapter “Toward the Need for Dynamical Systems Modeling in Psychopathology: Features of Mental Disorder that Any Explanatory Theory Must Consider and Key Definitions Thereof”, and points out that they can be distinguished in a biologically motivated manner, and used to mathematically model a multilevel adaptive dynamical system architecture for how environmental factors can lead, via epigenetic and related modulatory changes, to reduced self-regulation of different psychological or biological systems that in turn can be related to different mental disorders (without excluding genotype). The volume illustrates how such a multilevel adaptive dynamical system architecture with a biological pathway of five levels of control can be formalised, simulated and analysed, via self-modeling temporal-causal network models. Within the volume, the approach is illustrated for a wide variety of mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, autism, burnout, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and more. All this will be briefly introduced in the current chapter.