Emotion dysregulation, which is often defined as the inability to modulate strong negative affective states including impulsivity, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety, is observed in nearly all psychiatric disorders. These include internalizing disorders such as panic disorder and major depression, externalizing disorders such as conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder, and various others including schizophrenia, autism, and borderline personality disorder. Among many affected individuals, precursors to emotion dysregulation appear early in development, and often predate the emergence of diagnosable psychopathology. The Oxford Handbook of Emotion Dysregulation brings together experts whose work cuts across levels of analysis, including neurobiological, cognitive, and social, in studying emotion dysregulation. Contributing authors describe how early environmental risk exposures shape emotion dysregulation, how emotion dysregulation manifests in various forms of mental illness, and how emotion dysregulation is most effectively assessed and treated. Conceptualizing emotion dysregulation as a core vulnerability to psychopathology is consistent with modern transdiagnostic approaches to diagnosis and treatment, including the Research Domain Criteria and the Unified Protocol, respectively. This handbook is the first text to assemble a highly accomplished group of authors to address conceptual issues in emotion dysregulation research, define the emotion dysregulation construct across levels of cognition, behavior, and social dynamics, describe cutting edge assessment techniques at neural, psychophysiological, and behavioral levels of analysis, and present contemporary treatment strategies.

Recent developments in the conceptualization of externalizing spectrum disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and substance use disorders, suggest common genetic and neural substrates. Despite this, neither shared vulnerabilities nor their implications for developmental models of externalizing conduct are captured by prevailing nosologic and diagnostic systems, such as the DSM-5. The Oxford Handbook of Externalizing Spectrum Disorders is the first book of its kind to capture the developmental psychopathology of externalizing spectrum disorders by examining causal factors across levels of analysis and developmental epochs, while departing from the categorical perspective. World renowned experts on externalizing psychopathology demonstrate how shared genetic and neural vulnerabilities predispose to trait impulsivity, a highly heritable personality construct that is often shaped by adverse environments into increasingly intractable forms of externalizing conduct across development. Consistent with contemporary models of almost all forms of psychopathology, the Handbook emphasizes the importance of neurobiological vulnerability and environmental risk interactions in the expression of externalizing behavior across the lifespan. The volume concludes with an integrative, ontogenic process model of externalizing psychopathology in which diverse equifinal and multifinal pathways to disorder are specified.