New genetic sites associated with ‘big five’ personality traits.

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Your DNA has long been known to play a role in shaping your personality. Now, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) have taken the next step in determining how exactly they identify a number of new genetic sites associated with specific personality traits. They published their findings in Nature Human behavior on August 12.

Using data from the Million Veteran Program, researchers conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify genetic variations called “loci” associated with each of the “Big Five” personality traits: extraversion, openness, agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness. The researchers then combined this data with previous GWAS to conduct a meta-analysis of nearly 700,000 individuals, the largest GWAS for personality traits to date.

“We’re one step closer in this process of increasing our sample size to understand more clearly which variants are actually associated with these personality traits,” says Daniel Levey, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at YSM and principal investigator of the study. .

The Big Five and novel loci

The Big Five personality traits are a scientifically based measure of personality that can be studied using self-reported ratings that indicate whether people score high or low on each of the five traits. Participants in the Million Veteran Program, a national research program that collects data, including genetic information, from veterans to better understand genes and health, completed these assessments in addition to providing a blood sample for genetic analysis.

By comparing the results of the personality assessment with an analysis of variation in the participants’ DNA, Levey and his team found 62 new loci associated with neuroticism. They also identified loci for agreeableness for the first time. Combining their results with previously published data, they performed a meta-analysis to identify more than 200 genetic loci in five personality traits.

Despite the large amount of genetic variation they found, Levey hopes they can expand these studies further in the future, eventually increasing the number of participants to millions of people rather than hundreds of thousands, and increasing the diversity of participants. good. Current studies of genes and personality have largely been done by people with European ancestry.

“In order to be sure to say what the direction of the effect of these variations is and what the actual precise effect of the variation is, we need to have much larger sample sizes,” says Levey. “Current human genetic studies are homogenous compared to the world population.” If you were able to bring in more diverse people and you were able to look at how the associations overlap in one population versus another, that would give us a narrower definition.”

Genes, personality and mental health

Levey and his team also investigated genetic correlations between personality traits and various mental health conditions. They found a strong overlap between neuroticism, a personality trait marked by negative feelings, and depression and anxiety. People high in agreeableness, a personality trait characterized by a tendency to get along well with others, were less likely to experience these conditions. These associations are already well understood from a psychiatric perspective, but Levey’s findings provide further genetic confirmation.

Priya Gupta, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Levey’s lab and first author of the manuscript, says that “although genetics is largely beyond our control, a deeper understanding of our personality traits can help us become more aware of potential mental health risks and develop effective coping strategies for addressing these risks.”

But just because there’s a genetic basis for associations between personality traits and certain mental health conditions doesn’t mean those associations last a lifetime, Levey says.

“Your personality adapts and changes over time, so there’s a temporal relationship that we don’t necessarily capture in the cross-sectional way that we look at personality in our study,” he says. “Just because we find these genetic variations, it doesn’t mean that these are things that are fated and you can’t change them in your life.”

Levey hopes that such personality studies may one day be useful in informing early treatment of mental health conditions.

“When you look at these personality traits that are more prone to later development of mental illness, it can be prodromal [a period of subclinical symptoms] Look at who might be at higher risk, and then maybe that could be a case for intervention,” he says. “Even though we can genetically measure associations with traits like neuroticism, that doesn’t mean you can’t change your coping strategies in ways that might help you achieve better outcomes.”

Reference: Gupta P, Galimberti M, Liu Y et al. A genome-wide investigation of the underlying genetic architecture of personality traits and the overlap with psychopathology. Nat Hum Behav. 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01951-3

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