The discovery of genetic loci associated with subjective well-being, depression, and neuroticism has proven elusive. Our study identified several credible associations for two main reasons. First, our analyses had greater statistical power than prior studies because ours were conducted in larger samples. Our GWAS findings—three loci associated with subjective well-being, two with depressive symptoms, and eleven with neuroticism—support the view that GWAS can successfully identify genetic associations with highly polygenic phenotypes in sufficiently large samples5,36. A striking finding is that two of our identified associations are with inversion polymorphisms.
