We were able to assemble much larger samples than prior work in part because we combined data across heterogeneous phenotype measures. Our results reinforce the conclusions from our theoretical analysis that doing so increased our statistical power, but our strategy also has drawbacks. One is that mixing different measures may make any discovered associations more difficult to interpret. Research studying higher quality measures of the various facets of subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism is a critical next step. Our results can help facilitate such work because if the variants we identify are used as candidates, studies conducted in the smaller samples in which more fine-grained phenotype measures are available can be well powered.
