Figure 3.

A model of Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) pathways linking psychopathology with telomere attrition. A move by mental health researchers to adopt the RDoC framework, which focuses on transdiagnostic processes present across psychiatric disorders, provides a new way to think about how psychopathology confers a biological influence on accelerated cellular aging, which in turn results in elevated rates of chronic disease. Some of the RDoC domains have been examined with respect to telomere attrition, and this is reflected in the figure. Additional research is needed to test many of the proposed constructs within each domain to determine which of these common pathways may account for the telomere attrition observed across multiple psychiatric illnesses.