SE = 0.04)11,21. However, prior work has found neuroticism but not openness to be correlated with externalizing21, while we found a positive correlation with openness (rg = 0.22, SE = 0.04) but not with neuroticism (rg = 0.02, SE = 0.05). Notably, EXT was also correlated with suicide attempts (rg = 0.68, SE = 0.08) and post-traumatic stress disorder (rg = 0.53, SE = 0.06). EXT showed more modest inverse correlations with educational attainment (rg = −0.32, SE = 0.02) and intelligence (rg = −0.23, SE = 0.02), indicating that EXT is not simply reflecting genetic influences on cognitive ability. Finally, there was a significant correlation with the Townsend index (rg = 0.71, SE = 0.05), a measure of neighborhood deprivation that reflects high concentrations of unemployment, household overcrowding, and lower home- and car-ownership22. Genetic correlations can reflect correlated social processes or variables that are nonrandomly distributed with respect to genotypes, such as genetic nurture or neighborhood conditions, and we return to this topic in within-family analyses below.
