According to our Bayesian calculations, the true explanatory power (corrected for winner’s curse) of the SNP with the largest posterior R2 is 0.003% for subjective well-being, 0.002% for depressive symptoms, and 0.011% for neuroticism (Supplementary Table 14). These effect sizes imply that in order to account for even a moderate share of the heritability, hundreds or (more likely) thousands of variants will be required. They also imply that our study’s power to detect variants of these effect sizes was not high—for example, our statistical power to detect the lead SNP with largest posterior R2 was only ~13%—which in turn means it is likely that there exist many variants with effect sizes comparable to our identified SNPs that evaded detection. These estimates suggest that many more loci will be found in studies with sample sizes realistically attainable in the near future. Consistent with this projection, when we meta-analyze the 54 SNPs reaching p < 10−5 in our analyses of depressive symptoms together with the 23andMe replication sample for depression, the number of genome-wide significant associations rises from 2 to 5 (Supplementary Table 15).
