Cultural epigenetics of psychopathology--论文代写范文精选

51Due论文代写网精选essay代写范文：“ Cultural epigenetics of psychopathology” 我们扩展认知范式基于渐近定理的表达，例如遗传流行病学信息理论。特别是,我们认识到文化在人类生物学的基本作用。这篇心理essay代写范文讲述的是文化精神病理学的遗传学研究。我们通过一个模型，指导发展轨迹,并与个人本体变得错综复杂,这其中本身就是文化驱动。当前我们的工作在精神病学上，有着基因与环境交互作用，事实上,传统的文化和遗传系统可能提供复杂疾病的遗传，这正在引起激烈的讨论。人类的精神疾病是不清楚的。

Abstract 
We extend a cognitive paradigm for gene expression based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to the epigenetic epidemiology of mental disorders. In particular, we recognize the fundamental role culture plays in human biology, another heritage mechanism parallel to, and interacting with, the more familiar genetic and epigenetic systems. We do this via a model through which culture acts as another tunable epigenetic catalyst that both directs developmental trajectories, and becomes convoluted with individual ontology, via a mutually-interacting crosstalk mediated by a social interaction that is itself culturally driven. We call for the incorporation of embedding culture as an essential component of the epigenetic regulation of human mental development and its dysfunctions, bringing what is perhaps the central reality of human biology into the center of biological psychiatry. Current US work on gene-environment interactions in psychiatry must be extended to a model of gene-cultureenvironment interaction to avoid becoming victim of an extreme American individualism that threatens to create paradigms particular to that culture and that are, indeed, peculiar in the context of the world’s cultures. The cultural and epigenetic systems of heritage may well provide the ‘missing’ heritability of complex diseases now under so much intense discussion.

Introduction 
Human mental disorders are not well understood. Official classifications as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - fourth edition, (DSMIV, 1994), the standard descriptive nosology in the US, have even been characterized as ‘prescientific’ by P. Gilbert (2001) and others. Johnson-Laird et al. (2006) claim that current knowledge about psychological illnesses is comparable to the medical understanding of epidemics in the early 19th century. Physicians realized then that cholera, for example, was a specific disease, which killed about a third of the people whom it infected. What they disagreed about was the cause, the pathology, and the communication of the disease. 

Similarly, according to Johnson-Laird et al., most medical professionals these days realize that psychological illnesses occur (cf. DSMIV), but they disagree about their cause and pathology. Notwithstanding DSMIV, Johnson-Laird et al. doubt whether any satisfactory a priori definition of psychological illness can exist because it is a matter for theory to elucidate. Atmanspacher (2006) argues that formal theory of high level cognitive process is itself at a point similar to that of physics 400 years ago, in that the basic entities, and the relations between them, have yet to be delineated. More generally, simple arguments from genetic determinism regarding mental disorders fail, in part because of a draconian population bottleneck that, early in our species’ history, resulted in an overall genetic diversity less than that observed within and between contemporary chimpanzee subgroups. 

Manolio et al. (2009) describe this conundrum more generally in terms of ‘finding the missing heritability of complex diseases’. They observe, for example, that at least 40 loci have been associated with human height, a classic complex trait with an estimated heritability of about 80 %, yet they explain only about 5 % of phenotype variance despite studies of tens of thousands of people. This result, they find, is typical across a broad range of supposedly heritable diseases, and call for extending beyond current genome-wide assoication approaches to illuminate the genetics of complex diseases and enhance its potential to enable effective disease prevention or treatment. Arguments from psychosocial stress fare better (e.g., Brown et al., 1973; Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend, 1974; Eaton, 1978), particularly for depression (e.g., Risch et al., 2009), but are affected by the apparently complex and contingent developmental paths determining the onset of schizophrenia, dementias, psychoses, and so forth, some of which may be triggered in utero by exposure to infection, low birthweight, or other functional teratogens. P. Gilbert suggests an extended evolutionary perspective, in which evolved mechanisms like the ‘flight-or-fight’ response are inappropriately excited or suppressed, resulting in such conditions as anxiety or post traumatic stress disorders. 

Nesse (2000) suggests that depression may represent the dysfunction of an evolutionary adaptation which down-regulates foraging activity in the face of unattainable goals. 2 Kleinman and Good, however, (1985, p. 492) outline something of the cross cultural subtleties affecting the study of depression that seem to argue against any simple evolutionary or genetic interpretation. They state that, when culture is treated as a constant, as is common when studies are conducted in our own society, it is relatively easy to view depression as a biological disorder, triggered by social stressors in the presence of ineffective support, and reflected in a set of symptoms or complaints that map back onto the biological substrate of the disorder. However, they continue, when culture is treated as a significant variable, for example, when the researcher seriously confronts the world of meaning and experience of members of non-Western societies, many of our assumptions about the nature of emotions and illness are cast in sharp relief. 

Dramatic differences are found across cultures in the social organization, personal experience, and consequences of such emotions as sadness, grief, and anger, of behaviors such as withdrawal or aggression, and of psychological characteristics such as passivity and helplessness or the resort to altered states of consciousness. They are organized differently as psychological realities, communicated in a wide range of idioms, related to quite varied local contexts of power relations, and are interpreted, evaluated, and responded to as fundamentally different meaningful realities. Depressive illness and dysphoria are thus not only interpreted differently in non-Western societies and across cultures; they are constituted as fundamentally different forms of social reality.(论文代写)

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