I would like to think the old “nature versus nurture” dispute is pretty much dead and buried in psychology. Instead, we are now trying to understand how nature AND nurture – our genetic material and our environment – together both shape us into who we are.
One way to look at the genetics of psychological traits is to do a genome-wide association study, or GWAS for short.
To put it simply, a GWAS is a study where we try to find out whether a specific trait (such as the risk of a certain disease, or a certain psychological trait) is associated with genetic variants – differences in our DNA.
These are usually huge international projects, where dozens of researchers combine data from tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Our group has also participated in some fascinating GWAS projects.
This year, we took part in showing how
- well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism are associated with genetic variants (Okbay et al, Nature Genetics 2016)
- educational attainment, while mostly environmentally determined, is associated with genetic variants – and these genetic differences could affect, for example, our development during the fetal period (Okbay et. al, Nature 2016)
- a huge number of genetic differences may each play a small part in explaining why some people are more extroverted than others (van den Berg et. al, Behavior Genetics 2016)
What an exciting time to do psychological research!
/Sara Sammallahti