| 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. |