The genetic aetiology of subjective wellbeing and related positive traits: Insights from diverse phenotyping

The largest genome-wide association study of subjective wellbeing comprised almost 300,000 individuals and identified three genome-wide significant hits (Okbay et al., 2016). To maximise sample size, cohorts were included with... [ view full abstract ]

The largest genome-wide association study of subjective wellbeing comprised almost 300,000 individuals and identified three genome-wide significant hits (Okbay et al., 2016). To maximise sample size, cohorts were included with only single item measures of subjective wellbeing. Future directions encourage the use of more comprehensive measures of subjective wellbeing and related positive traits. Using the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), we investigated three different measures of subjective wellbeing and other positive traits including: optimism, basic psychological needs, gratitude and meaning in life. We focus specifically on adolescents and young adults with data collected at 16 and 23 years in TEDS and ALSPAC respectively. Twin and SNP-based heritability estimates of these measures were calculated and compared suggesting moderate contribution of common genetic variants across all phenotypes. We ran a proxy-phenotype analysis using the GWAS SNPs aiming to identify novel SNPs associated with the related positive traits. Finally, we calculated polygenic scores from the GWAS data to explain the variance in our measures of subjective wellbeing and related traits in adolescence. These applications of the GWAS results indicate unique genetic components of the diverse measures and emphasise the requirement for larger datasets of positive traits to fully understand the genetic aetiology of subjective wellbeing.