我们都在不时的改变我们的情绪，快乐、悲伤或愤怒，这些情绪是多么强烈的情感表达。这种变化是我们人格的一部分，可以被视为一个积极方面，也增加社会的多样性。然而，有些人发现很难调节自己的情绪，这严重影响他们的工作、家庭和社会生活。这些人会被诊断为情绪不稳定的边缘型人格障碍或反社会人格障碍等。
先前的研究已经表明，患有情绪不稳定疾病的人们表现出某些大脑区域的体积有所减少。科学家们想知道在健康的个体中这些区域与调节情绪的能力是否相关。在目前的研究中，87名健康受试者要求填写临床问卷，并研究他们在日常生活中调节情绪出现的问题到什么程度。受试者的大脑用MRI扫描，科学家们发现，在低额叶区域，所谓的眼窝前额皮质，报告说有调节情绪问题的健康个体的眼窝前额皮质体积较小，而且问题越大，体积越小。研究已知边缘型人格障碍患者和反社会人格障碍患者大脑该区域体积都较小。相似的结果也出现在大脑其它的区域，它们对情绪调节也非常重要。
“结果支持这一观点，也就是我们有连续调节情绪的能力，如果你是极端的一面，那么你在社会功能上很可能会有问题，由此就会出现精神疾病。”Predrag Petrovic副教授说，“根据这一理念，这种疾病不应被视为绝对的，这要依靠你是否有特定的条件。它应该被视为是在正常的总体变化程度上的一个极端变体。”
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PMID:
Significant grey matter changes in a region of the orbitofrontal cortex in healthy participants predicts emotional dysregulation
Predrag Petrovic, Carl Johan Ekman, Johanna Klahr, Lars Tigerström, Göran Rydén, Anette G. M. Johansson, Carl Sellgren, Armita Golkar, Andreas Olsson, Arne Öhman, Martin Ingvar and Mikael Landén
The traditional concept of ‘categorical’ psychiatric disorders has been challenged as many of the symptoms display a continuous distribution in the general population. We suggest that this is the case for emotional dysregulation, a key component in several categorical psychiatric disorder constructs. We used voxel-based magnetic resonance imaging morphometry in healthy human subjects (n = 87) to study how self-reported subclinical symptoms associated with emotional dysregulation relate to brain regions assumed to be critical for emotion regulation. To measure a pure emotional dysregulation, we also corrected for subclinical symptoms of non-emotional attentional dysregulation. We show that such subclinical emotional symptoms correlate negatively with the grey matter volume of lateral orbitofrontal cortex bilaterally—a region assumed to be critical for emotion regulation and dysfunctional in psychiatric disorders involving emotional dysregulation. importantly, this effect is mediated both by a decrease in volume associated with emotional dysregulation and an increase in volume due to non-emotional attentional dysregulation. Exploratory analysis suggests that other regions involved in emotional processing such as insula and ventral striatum also show a similar reduction in grey matter volume mirroring clinical disorders associated with emotional dysregulation. Our findings support the concept of continuous properties in psychiatric symptomatology.