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The Genetics of Happiness
Hugh Pickens writes "Studies comparing identical twins with non-identical twins have helped to establish the heritability of many aspects of behavior. Recent work suggests that about one third of the variation in people's happiness is heritable. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve has taken the study a step further, picking a popular suspect — the gene that encodes the serotonin-transporter protein, a molecule that shuffles a brain messenger called serotonin through cell membranes — and examined how variants of the 5-HTT gene affect levels of happiness. The serotonin-transporter gene comes in two functional variants—long and short and people have two versions (known as alleles) of each gene, one from each parent. After examining genetic data from more than 2,500 participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, De Neve found that people with one long allele were 8% more likely than those with none to describe themselves as very satisfied with life and those with two long alleles were 17% more likely of describing themselves as very satisfied. Interestingly enough, there is a notable variation across races with Asian Americans in the sample having on average 0.69 long genes, white Americans with 1.12, and black Americans with 1.47. 'It has long been suspected that this gene plays a role in mental health but this is the first study to show that it is instrumental in shaping our individual happiness levels (PDF),' writes De Neve. 'This finding helps to explain why we each have a unique baseline level of happiness and why some people tend to be naturally happier than others, and that's in no small part due to our individual genetic make-up.'"
So the summary implies that black people are expected to be happier. Is that what is observed in the wild?
We wouldn't have a republican party
So how long until the protein the long allele encodes is produced and sold as happiness drug?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I was told it isn't length that makes happy. It is width.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
There is an excelent Stanford course in youtube.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Did the study differentiate between "Happy" people and delusional people?
and that's in no small part due to our individual genetic make-up.
I know this is a semantically pedantic rant, but when I see comments like that, it just makes me want to face palm. Of course our genetic make-up determines who we are. Whether we're happy (as in this study), the color of our eyes, male/female/miscellaneous (Hindu! There are 700 million of us!), how tall we are or whatever, it is our genes that, almost without exception, determine who we are.
To say otherwise, or feign surprise, is just stupid.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
They found a Hindu gene? Can you cite? And how close are they to fiinding the pentecostal gene yet?
2 points.
First - Yes - it has been obsered in the wild. That was the point of the study.
Second - and this is imporant - they were testing "Black Americans". African gene are the most heterogeneous - which is what one would expect from the cradle of mankind. "Black Americans" genes are much more homogeneous since they were drawn from a limited pool. So while we can say this is true for Black Americans but it does not say anything about Africans in general.
That's the sort of tosh that sounds very poetic; but is really nonsense.
Moods don't "mean" things: they are physiological states, not symbols. Further, "happy" isn't something you infer by playing compare-and-contrast, it's the immediate introspective impression of a certain state(just as certain sensations on the skin are pleasant per se, not by contrast to being on fire.)
Our present knowledge of psycho-pharmacology and neurology is blunt enough that shooting for permanent happiness is not a particularly good move; but that's a technological problem, not some sort of issue in epistemology.
Mob psychology is the echo chamber of common sense. And that's the good outcome. Even worse is nature/nurture where there was never much common sense to begin with.
Yes, there are correlates on both sides despite one or more mixing rounds of bent functions.
How does one perform medical epidemiology on an encryption block your kid sister wrote? Let's say your kid sister is Judit Polgar and she's almost smart enough to get this right (having not actually majored in math or computer science), but then you truncate to two rounds, so it's more like scrambling eggs with a spatula rather than an egg beater. This is a good model for the human nature/nurture system.
Permute the keys bits holding the block bits constant. Permute the block bits holding the key bits constant. Throw this into a powerful statistics whizinart, then press "publish" to gasps and wows from the bleachers of humanity who are slow to grasp that their common sense on this matter is six feet under.
Yeah, you can probably partition into dozens of sub-regions of statistically significant linearity manipulating the input bits on either side. There's many discernible chunks of white and yolk in the spastic scramble.
Even if you take major features of culture (such as our universal 12 year educational system, which represents about a millisecond of our 80ka recent history) and correlate genes most amenable to this, there's a wide span of orbital radius as experienced by any particular member of the population.
If a trillion dollars worth of epidemiology tells you less about a person on a quick reading of their gene chart than you get from an astute five minute introductory conversation, what exactly has all this research accomplished?
What we will find eventually are a few genes or gene complexes which correlate strongly with the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of proposed interventions (such as reading assistance). The exact fractal coefficient on little peaks of signal exploitation is certainly a quantity of interest moving forward. I'm pretty sure it's bounded from above by log (panacea).
We'll all become a tiny bit better at playing to strength. And most of the rest of the signal will fall below the noise floor of messy human affairs.
Here's the surprise twist: astute assessment is thin on the ground (the sap to syrup problem) and nearly impossible to institutionalize. So unless our machines become astute ASAP (as some predict), we'll probably press forward with the institutional seal club of genomic aphorism.
Not that I put much store in such things, but studies and surveys show your statement is totally backwards--republicans (or, more specifically, conservatives) tend to be happier than democrats (liberals):
http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/04/23/conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals-discuss/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=BABCDEA5-D180-499B-094168CBE5442468
On a purely anecdotal level, I would say that I would categorize more of my conservative friends as "happy people" than I would my liberal friends. There are of course dozens of exceptions, and, like I said, I don't put much store in this stuff anyway (especially non-scientific anecdotal).
I have depression and have had it since I was 16. My parents don't. My brothers don't. No one in my family on either side suffers from it. And yet, SSRI's work for me, not NRI's, DRI's or MAOI's. I wouldn't associate it with genetics based purely on subjective observations.
That's so depressing. :(
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Here's the caveat in the actual paper:
We nd evidence of signicant association in both data sets,
suggesting that the SLC6A4 gene may play a role in explaining subjective
well-being. While we do not claim that SLC6A4 determines happiness, nor
do we exclude the possibility that several other genes may also play a role,
we do think that the results suggest at least one possible causal pathway
able to account for the inuence of genes on happiness
Here's a quote from The Economist describing the paper:
Recent work on both these fronts suggests that happiness is highly heritable . . . so, presumably, the tendency to be happy or miserable is, to some extent, passed on through DNA.
"Suggests" is a scientific weasel word that can be improperly read by morons as "concludes." Or intentionally misconstrued by journalists because a study that doesn't conclude anything and merely provides a data set that may be useful in the future isn't that interesting and they want clicks. Doing more studies may show a regression toward the mean. A more nuanced classification of the participants may suggest something else. Call me a skeptic - I'll take it as a compliment. Skepticism is logical. Drawing conclusions from this study is not.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I think you're too quick to dismiss the importance of relative moods. Pain or pleasure is often relative to a normal baseline, and if somebody never experiences pain, they will be terribly hurt by a small trauma. Similarly, a small bit of happiness in a miserable life can be transforming.
I agree that all states aren't relative. I'd offer 'contentment' as an example. It's a wonderful feeling, and it doesn't really fade. You have it or you don't.
"Happy" and "sad" are a bound pair - you can't have one without the other. If you were happy all the time, never experiencing sadness, the term "happy" would be meaningless. You would just "be."
Your tongue rattles around inside your mouth all the time. Plenty of contact sensations there, the vast majority of which are ignored because they are always there. Munching a strawberry is pleasant; munching your tongue is unpleasant. So your tongue-contact state space decomposes into "pleasant," "unpleasant," and "meh." Pleasant and Unpleasant are a duality pair - eliminate one and the other goes with it. You're just left with "meh" at that point.
Not after two or three generations of 'Massa' creeping out for some action in the slave quarters (and occasionally dying of pneumonia during Virginia winter visits, ahem).
Every Night and every Morn,
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night,
Some are Born to Sweet Delight.
Some are Born to Sweet Delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.
- William Blake