Future Directions in Emotion Dysregulation and Youth Psychopathology

Abstract

This article reviews central nervous system substrates and autonomic correlates of emotion dysregulation and offers several suggestions for future research. Studies conducted in the last two decades indicate that effective emotion regulation requires efficient top-down, cortically mediated regulation of bottom-up, subcortically mediated individual differences in trait impulsivity and trait anxiety. Without making critical distinctions between highly heritable individual differences in trait impulsivity and trait anxiety, versus less heritable and more socialized deficiencies in emotion regulation, progress in understanding the development of psychopathology among children and adolescents will be hampered. Future research can also be improved by measuring emotion dysregulation across multiple level of analysis, specifying physiological mechanisms through which operant reinforcement shapes emotional lability, improving the internal and external validity of psychophysiological measures, integrating emotion dysregulation into factor analytic and behavioral genetic models of psychopathology, identifying molecular genetic risk for emotion dysregulation, and expanding neuroimaging research on emotion dysregulation among children and adolescents.