The role of environmental enrichment on neurodevelopment: Emotion regulation in adolescence as a model paradigm

Abstract

George Engel’s 1977 biopsychosocial model remains effective to this day in positioning the environment on equal footing with biology in formulations of adolescent health and well-being. While the intervening “decade of the brain” and contemporary initiatives such as the Research Domain Criteria approach have most directly updated our understanding of the constitutional elements of mental health, environmental contributions to these elements have kept apace. In this chapter, emotion regulation, a key intrinsic process and transdiagnostic marker of mental health with defined neural correlates, is developed as an exemplary nodal point for demonstrating the crucial influence of the environment in the development of brain and behavior.