Personality Is Linked to Genes, New Study Finds

—Flavio Coelho—Getty Images When it comes to personality , humanity contains all sorts, from people who thrive on socializing to those who’d prefer to have a quiet cup of tea at home.

Psychologists have found that five dimensions of personality, often termed the “Big Five ,” are reliable descriptors of temperament.

Given regular questionnaires about their lives and attitudes, people tend to score consistently across their lifetimes on extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness (a tendency to go with the flow), neuroticism (a tendency toward anxiety and other negative emotions), and conscientiousness (like self-discipline and rule-following).

Exactly how these tendencies arise, and the extent to which they are the result of nature or nurture, are areas of active research .

Now, in a paper published in Nature on September 2, scientists who examined the genes of more than a million people who also took personality questionnaires have revealed a swath of genetic variants linked to each of the Big Five traits.

This information opens the door to research into the intersection of personality and biology, helping to answer questions about how we become who we are.

What’s the relationship between genes and your personality? Psychologists have long suspected that some aspects of personality must be genetic, says Denis Bratko, a psychologist at the University of Zagreb in Croatia who has studied this question but was not involved in the new research.

Previous efforts to look for these links, however, did not uncover clear correlations— no particular gene or genes for extraversion, for example—likely because study sizes were small and because there are now thought to be many genetic variants, each with a subtle effect, involved in personality.

“Several decades of studies have seen failures because they [have been] looking for one or a few genes which will have a huge effect,” he says.

To overcome these problems, the authors of the new study reached out to scientists around the world who manage repositories of data that include both genomic information and information about personality.

“We think that personality is super-important for health,” says Michel Nivard, a professor of genomic epidemiology at University of Bristol in the U.K. and an author of the study.

Scores on Big Five traits have long been associated with risk for mental-health diagnoses; neuroticism, in particular, is linked to anxiety.

Personality can also help predict certain health outcomes, including whether people will stick with taking medication or seek out medical help for a problem.

What did researchers find? The study revealed more than 1,000 genetic variants that appear to contribute to personality.