In our two joint analyses, we exploit the high genetic correlation between subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism (i) to evaluate the credibility of the 16 genome-wide significant associations across the three phenotypes, and (ii) to identify novel associations (beyond those identified by the GWAS). For (i), we investigate whether our three subjective well-being-associated SNPs “quasi-replicate” by testing them for association with depressive symptoms and neuroticism. We similarly examine the quasi-replication record of the depressive symptoms and neuroticism loci by testing them for association with subjective well-being. We find that the quasi-replication record closely matches what would be expected given our statistical power if none of the genome-wide significant associations were chance findings. These results strengthen the credibility of (most of) the original associations. For (ii), we use a “proxy phenotype” approach6: we treat the set of loci associated with subjective well-being at p < 10−4 as candidates, and we test them for association with depressive symptoms and neuroticism. At the Bonferroni-adjusted 0.05 significance threshold, we identify two loci associated with both depressive symptoms and neuroticism and another two associated with neuroticism.
