Genetic variants associated with subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism identified through genome-wide analyses

In designing our study, we faced a tradeoff between analyzing a smaller sample with a homogeneous phenotype measure versus attaining a larger sample by jointly analyzing data from multiple cohorts with heterogeneous measures. For example, in our analysis of subjective well-being, we included measures of both life satisfaction and positive affect, even though these constructs are conceptually distinct7,8. In the Supplementary Note and Supplementary Figure 1, we present a theoretical framework for evaluating the costs and benefits of pooling heterogeneous measures. In our context, given the high genetic correlation across measures, the framework predicts that pooling increases statistical power to detect variants. This prediction is supported by our results.