Molecular Genetics and Subjective Well-Being

Meike Bartels, Daniel Benjamin, David Cesarini, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Magnus Johannesson, Philipp Koellinger, Robert F. Krueger, Patrik K. E. Magnusson, Nancy L. Pedersen, Cornelius A. Rietveld and Henning Tiemeier

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Subjective well-being (SWB) is a major topic of research across the social sciences. Twin and family studies have found that genetic factors may account for as much as 30-40% of the variance in SWB. Here, we study genetic contributions to SWB in a pooled sample of ~11,500 unrelated, comprehensively-genotyped Swedish and Dutch individuals. We apply a recently-developed method to estimate "common narrow heritability": the fraction of variance in SWB that can be explained by the cumulative additive effects of genetic polymorphisms that are common in the population. Our estimates are 5-10% for single-question survey measures of SWB, and 12-18% after correction for measurement error in the SWB measures. Our results suggest guarded optimism about the prospects of using genetic data in SWB research because, while the common narrow heritability is not large, the polymorphisms that contribute to it could feasibly be discovered with a sufficiently large sample of individuals.

Keywords: subjective well-being; heritability; genetics; GREML (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1225.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1225

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().