Epigenetics has caused a great deal of excitement in social science, as it provides a potential mechanism for how the environment can “get under the skin.” It provides a biological process by which exposure to environmental events could affect outcome and could lead to long-term enduring changes. Elegant work in animal models suggests that epigenetic changes may be involved in the associations between early environmental manipulations and long-term effects that persist into adulthood, and we refer the interested reader to reviews by Meaney and colleagues on this topic (Meaney, 2010; Zhang and Meaney, 2010). At this time, epigenetic processes are not well-understood. As mentioned previously, the mechanisms by which identified sequence variants in the genome affect outcome are also poorly understood at this time. It is possible that some of these variants may act by altering the likelihood of epigenetic modification, providing an explanation for why some individuals are more influenced by environmental events. Future research is necessary to better understand how these genetic phenomena interrelate.
