T17 - The Genetic Variants That Influence Our Happiness And Positive Behaviours Also Influence Which Life Events Happen To Us

Abstract

Background Often, life events do not simply happen to us. As with other environments, we make them more or less likely through our behaviour, and that behaviour is partly influenced by our DNA. Previous research has shown that the genetic variants that influence negative behaviours also influence negative life events. We investigated whether the same is true for positive behaviours: do we seek out and construct the events of our lives partly because of genetic influences on our psychological wellbeing? Methods We collected a broad battery of positive psychological measures from over 9,000 16-year-old twins from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), including subjective happiness, life satisfaction, optimism, hopefulness, trust, competence, relatedness, autonomy, meaning in life, ambition, grit, curiosity, and gratitude, along with subjective health. The twins also responded to 20 items from the Coddington life events scale. We split these into positive and negative events using valence ratings given by the twins who had experienced the event and conducted bivariate twin analyses between life events and the 14 wellbeing traits. Results 22% of the population variance in positive life events can be explained by genetic variation, and 33% for negative life events. This can partially be explained by shared genetic influences between life events and psychological wellbeing. The wellbeing traits were positively genetically correlated with positive life events (mean r=0.21) and negatively genetically correlated with negative life events (mean r=-0.15). Those positive traits that drive behaviour (grit and ambition) showed highest genetic correlation with life events (r = 0.34 and 0.33 respectively), whereas the more reflective trait gratitude showed no significant correlation (r = -0.03). Discussion Our results suggest that genetic influences on active positive behaviours in particular may partly explain the heritability of life events, by prompting us to seek out or construct environments where they are likely to occur.