Scientists Find Gene That Predicts Happiness In Women

An anonymous reader writes "For reasons that scientists have not conclusively determined, women are happier than men. And now, researchers think that they may have pinpointed one of the reasons for that. They have found a gene in women that predicts the level of happiness in women. 'After controlling for various factors, ranging from age and education to income, the researchers found that women with the low-expression type of MAOA were significantly happier than others. Compared to women with no copies of the low-expression version of the MAOA gene, women with one copy scored higher on the happiness scale and those with two copies increased their score even more. While a substantial number of men carried a copy of the "happy" version of the MAOA gene, they reported no more happiness than those without it.'"

Comments

Spoilers

[GameboyRMH]

For reasons that scientists have not conclusively determined, women are happier than men

Spoilers: It's the difficulty of getting laid. A woman only has to ask "Sex?"

Re:Spoilers

[dkleinsc]

That's not true and you know it. If an 80-year-old woman came up to you and asked "Sex?", you'd probably leave very very quickly. Also, some guys don't just sleep with anything they can and want to evaluate potential partners for being decent-looking, reasonably healthy, and not crazy before jumping into bed.

Some real reasons women might be happier (as always, variations within a gender are much wider than variations between an average man and an average woman):
- Women tend to do a better job of building up a support network of friends and family, so if something goes wrong they have help they can call on.
- Moms tend to bond more closely with their children than dads. If you have kids, you're generally happier when you spend more time with them.
- As of quite recently, women are more educated than men, and also are more likely to be employed. Material security contributes a great deal towards happiness.

Re:Spoilers

[mcgrew]

Actually, I'd like to see the study that says woman are happier than men, because that flies in the face of my experience. Most of the women I know are either depressed or angry all the time.

The unhappy men I know are all married.

Re:Spoilers

[circletimessquare]

Also, some guys don't just sleep with anything they can and want to evaluate potential partners for being decent-looking, reasonably healthy, and not crazy before jumping into bed.

You are on the wrong website sir.

Re:Spoilers

[Hatta]

That's not true and you know it.

It's much closer to true than you want to admit. If you send a group of average looking college students onto campus to randomly proposition people of the opposite sex, the majority of females will get affirmative responses, and the majority of males will get negative responses. Women have a much easier time than men getting laid. That's scientific fact.

Re:Spoilers

[dsvick]

Most of the women I know are either depressed or angry all the time.

And the common factor is ..... :)

sorry, had to!

Re:Spoilers

[girlintraining]

Women have a much easier time than men getting laid. That's scientific fact.

Whoa there, partner. That's not science: That's social role. If you were in a different culture, it would be a different story. Try being a woman in feudal china: You had no rights. You slept with whomever the eldest male told you to. You married whomever your family told you to. For most of human history as it turns out, women were not given much choice on who they'd have sex with, and rape was a viable and commonly-practiced method of procreation. There's a 5% chance you're directly descended from Ghenghis Khan. And in pre-modern times, the spoils of a battle were often women. Generals had serious morale problems if they didn't produce enemy women on a regular basis -- it was one of the sign-up bonuses.

So don't tell me that it's a scientific fact. This isn't like gravity -- it existed 5 billion years ago, it'll still exist 5 billion years from now. That is a scientific fact. What you're talking about is just a re-arrangement of prejudices and commonly held conceptions and perceptions of the world as it exists right now. And if there's anything science teaches us, it's that the only constant... is change. These social values and ideas you think are eternally unchanging are right now in a state of flux; It's just happening too slowly for you to perceive it. So don't assume just because you, or even a thousand people like you, observe something and agree it's true that it becomes a scientific fact. Science has rules; One of which is to ensure your sample isn't biased. Yours... very much... is.

Re:Spoilers

[ColdWetDog]

Never eat a place called Mom's.
Never play poker with a man named Doc.
Never sleep with a woman with a woman who has more problems than you do.

That, along with a roll of duct tape, some WD-40, a screwdriver and a hammer will get you pretty far in this world.

Re:Spoilers

[Hatta]

and work on myself to make myself interesting enough to be worth someone's time

This is the hard part. I have no idea why someone would be interested in a person. People aren't interesting, ideas are interesting. Having ideas doesn't seem to make one interesting to other people though, except for rare exceptions. I'm lucky enough to have found one, but in general it seems that being an interesting person has more to do with being able to talk big without actually saying anything.

In fact I found the difference so substantial that I came to suspect the "women are choosers, men are beggars, because evolution" hypothesis was more a just-so story to describe a stable cultural pattern than a real scientific theory.

If you're interacting with them enough for them to form an opinion, then you're not doing the same experiment I described. It's literally walking up to someone saying hi, and propositioning them.

Re:Spoilers

[Daniel Dvorkin]

average looking college students onto campus to randomly proposition people of the opposite sex

"Average looking college students" of both sexes are a pretty attractive group as a whole; they're generally healthy, in their reproductive prime, and have at least enough social status to get into college in the first place. So the experiences of the participants in this study aren't necessarily typical of what people from a demographically broader group would see--and given that the specific ways in which college students are attractive (especially youth and fertility) are generally understood to make up a larger component of women's attractiveness than of men's, I suspect that the results for them female study participants are more biased than those for the male participants.

Re:Spoilers

[PlusFiveTroll]

>Whoa there, partner. That's not science: That's social role.

In the vast majority of the animal kingdom, the female chooses which male partner to breed with. The males of a great many species look superficially different then the females. Bright colors, fancy displays, loud noises and songs, antlers and horns.. These are the things most commonly found on males. The females, especially in non-pairing or social grouping animals are very bland in color.

That's not social role, that's evolution saying it's easy for a woman to get laid.

Re:Spoilers

[shutdown -p now]

There are similar studies done across cultures, and they support the same thing.

There's a fairly obvious explanation for that, too. From evolutionary perspective, it makes more sense for man to have sex with as many women as he can, since that increases the chances of him spreading his genes around. So, natural selection favors men like that.

For a woman, that same perspective makes for bonding with a single man. She doesn't increase the chance of spreading her genes by having sex with multiple men - it's one baby at a time either way - but, what with primates being strong adherents of the K strategy, and with Homo in particular having significantly higher than average male contribution to progeny, it is important to secure the attention of one particular male to contribute to her progeny - which he'll do if it's also his progeny (or at least he believes so).

Of course, it's all somewhat more complicated - for example, from the above also follows that sexual selection by women will favor men who don't openly fuck everything that moves - females will tend to avoid such males because they're more likely to spread their effort across the many children they have, but they can't avoid them if they don't know. And so we arrive at the present "pretend to be monogamous when somebody's looking" arrangement...

Re:Spoilers

[tilante]

So... if something is limited in the time and space to which it applies, it can't be a scientific fact? Where do you draw the line?

It becomes a scientific fact when it can be reproduced by others reliably and consistently. The experiments we conduct today would have worked 200 years ago, or 2 million years ago, or many years from now. They are not time-sensitive, and they don't depend on the state of the observer (in this case, the cultural values of the observer), to be reproduced.

The correctly formulated version of the hypothesis -- "Women asking random men for sex are much more likely to get a positive response than men asking women, in the late 20th/early 21st century United States" -- can be reproduced by others reliably and consistently. Indeed, it has been. And this experiment doesn't depend on the observer's cultural values -- a Muslim Imam could be the observer, or an alien. The person asking for sex and the person being asked are experimental subjects who are being observed; they are not the observer, if the experiment is being conducted correctly.

And here's something else - a scientific experiment is supposed to be reproducible with the same results, so long as no significant variables are changed. In this case, culture of the test subjects is a significant variable. If you change it, you're no longer conducting the same experiment, and so your results are expected to be different.

To put it another way -- if you were in a physics lab, and the TA said, "Okay, today we're doing a lab on gravity and acceleration. If I drop a ball, it's going to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared..." would you immediately interrupt the TA to say that's not true, since if he dropped the ball on Mars it would be different? Or would you make the assumption that the TA is talking about the acceleration here and now, in the classroom where he's speaking?

People don't normally go around fully qualifying every statement of fact that they make, simply because it would take too much time. Now, the original poster was restating the results of the studies that he was talking about in an overly-general way... but that doesn't mean that those studies were not scientific. It just means that he's either overgeneralizing (which the first part of your post was an excellent counterpoint to), or that he's communicating poorly. In neither case does that affect the scientific standing of the studies that he's basing his statement on.

Re:Spoilers

[jheath314]

For most of human history as it turns out, women were not given much choice on who they'd have sex with, and rape was a viable and commonly-practiced method of procreation.

Now it's your turn to back up your assertions. While I agree that there has been a significant power difference between the genders for most (if not all) of human history, that is different from saying women had not much choice in the matter of who they ended up with. Humans are relatively unique among the primates in using pair-bonding as the dominant reproductive strategy (where almost every male has a chance to pass on his genes), rather than the alpha-male hierarchy seen in chimp, gorilla, and other ape societies. Genghis Khan is notable because he is the exception, rather than the rule, in our social organization.

Moreover, I would argue that human intelligence, and much of the culture that flows from it, is a sexually-selected trait, much like the feathers on a peacock's tail... females are generally attracted to men who can conspicuously show off their mental agility and creativity through displays such as music and dance, or through the accumulation of wealth. If women had no choice in who they mated with, these displays would be pointless from an evolutionary perspective. It is precisely because women had a choice in who they paired with that the selection pressure for intelligence far exceeded what was necessary for mere survival of the species.

Multiple orgasms

[Anonymous Coward]

That gene wouldn't happen to have an association with the one that allows for multiple orgasms in women, would it?

GATTACA

[GameboyRMH]

Now you can analyze your girlfriend's* DNA and see if she's only acting happy and would become miserable after marriage!

*Yeah this is Slashdot but the theory is sound

Re:GATTACA

[CubicleZombie]

Now you can analyze your girlfriend's* DNA and see if she's only acting happy and would become miserable after marriage!

It's a lot easier than that. Just plan a wedding. Whatever she's like during that process is what she'll be like after marriage. Bridezilla == Wifezilla.

Then throw a screaming baby and some surging hormones into the mix.

Somebody kill me.

Re:GATTACA

[hackula]

Just got married last weekend. Kept things simple with close to zero stress. Saved 20 grand and everyone's sanity. Wife was easy going and chill about everything. Pro tip: if your bride-to-be is freaking the fuck out about flowers, food, or chairs, then she is a psychopath. Do not marry a psychopath! This should go without saying, but somehow it is become the norm. Marry a woman, not a spoiled child.

Re:GATTACA

[khallow]

Do not marry a psychopath!

Make her a CEO instead.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

the gene is incredibly rare.

Hair?

[Chemisor]

This gene wouldn't be the one responsible for blond hair, would it?

Wait. What?

[squiggleslash]

There's such a thing as a happy woman?

Re:Wait. What?

[GameboyRMH]

A friend told me about his racing school teacher who was divorced many times and had discovered the secret to happy marriage: Add a piece of jewellery to the budget for every new set of tires.

For the average slashdotter just replace "new set of tires" with "new computer/PC overhaul"

Re:Wait. What?

[vbraga]

In my humble experience, the occasional flowers or chocolate box in an unexpected day works as well as a piece of jewellery every few years.

Re:Wait. What?

[Inda]

I've found that to be the quickest way of being accused of something.

"Chocolates? But it's not even my brithday. What have you broken?"

I jest. It's more like:

"Chocolates? Is it that time of year again? I'll shave my legs."

I jest.

I wish.

As a man, all I have to say about this news is

[circletimessquare]

it makes me unhappy. It's unfair. Lucky women. Life sucks. Leave me alone.

Of course they're happier...

[Anonymous Coward]

in most states they don't have to put up with wives.

Stabbing in the dark

[Spy Handler]

The picture I'm getting is that genetic tech and biochemistry is still in the dark ages. I mean, they have no idea how gene X works on a biochemical level, so they take a survey of people with gene X and ask how happy they are... and call that a study.

The good news is, once they figure this shit out and can accurately model all the biochemical reactions inside the human body, the possibilities are endless.

Re:Yay!

[tattood]

Once they make a pill to activate this gene, then yes.

you fail at biology forever

[Anonymous Coward]

reproduction for females is costly and dangerous, reproduction for males is cheap

for a man any cooter will do, for a woman a specific wang is sought after

and historically the number of wanted wangs has been much smaller than the number of available cooters, roughly 20% of men
------------
in other words, yes random screwing is easier for women but that's irrelevant because that's not what women want, they want screwing by the small subset of desirable men and that is just as hard if not harder harder than a random man finding a random woman

Re:you fail at biology forever

[Frosty Piss]

reproduction for females is costly and dangerous, reproduction for males is cheap

First of all sex is more than reproduction, you know this, right?

for a man any cooter will do, for a woman a specific wang is sought after

Second of all, you know that sex is for more than reproduction, right?

The VAST majority of sexually active females are *not* trying to have a baby.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[Scragglykat]

He's referring to the using of sex to get one's way/money/goods I believe. That's why when you get married, you stop getting it... because they already have everything you own. :o)

Re:you fail at biology forever

[tnk1]

The VAST majority of sexually active females are *not* trying to have a baby.

That is true in a conscious way, but they generally want to have sex when they feel like having sex. They will feel like having sex when their body tells them they are interested. That interest tends to be generated when certain requirements are met, unless they're somehow impaired (i.e. drunk). Those requirements will tend to reflect who will provide good genes for a child. That's why a woman can like a man just fine and think he is awesome, but has no interest in having sex with him.

You may well not have sex for reproduction, but we've evolved various aspects of it for that purpose, and nature doesn't care if we intend to get pregnant or not, it will do its best to find the right reproductive partner to have sex with if there is even a chance reproduction may occur.

Obviously, women can override the immediate desire to have sex and certainly can try and avoid pregnancy, but she's probably not going to try to override her instincts about who she finds attractive.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[HeckRuler]

The VAST majority of sexually active females are *not* trying to have a baby.

Well, NOW, yeah. But for the vast majority and prior banging, on the evolutionary time scale, the purpose was baby-making.
I mean, we're talking about genetics and the evolutionary forces that push for those genes, right?

It's legacy code that's vastly out of date, but hey, it's what we've got today and we have to live with it. Eventually we'll get around to refactoring it all, cleaning up the code, and steamlining the crufty parts, but it's good to know where we're at now.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[K. S. Kyosuke]

First of all sex is more than reproduction, you know this, right?

cca 1,000,000,000 years ago: Sexual reproduction appears and sexual behavior develops.

cca 200 years ago: Effective contraceptives get into widespread use.

You think that our basal ethology and psychology has had the time to adjust to the existence of artificial reproductive barriers?

Re:you fail at biology forever

[Frosty Piss]

He's referring to the using of sex to get one's way/money/goods I believe. That's why when you get married, you stop getting it...

Maybe I'm in the minority, but my wife likes sex just fine.

Maybe *YOUR* wife just doesn't like sex with YOU?

Re:you fail at biology forever

[mcgrew]

Your comment reminded me of an old joke:
What's the difference between a wife and a job?

After five years the job still sucks.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[invid]

Pregnant women still seek sex.

So...evolutionary forces should have made some sort of mechanism to turn off the sex drive while the woman is pregnant in order to prove to you that the sex evolved for the purpose of procreation? Evolution would only do that if the sex drive was sufficiently detrimental during pregnancy. That said, a secondary evolutionary benefit of sex is the strengthening of the pair bonds between parents, which could have been selected for and explain the generally horny nature of humans compared to other animals.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[hairyfeet]

Problem is women are more fucked up biologically than men, period. Now before the few females here have a shitfit, hear me out. In today's society the "Alpha male" is the one you do NOT want, they screw around thus bringing the risk of possibly deadly STDs, they don't provide for the female thus leaving her and the offspring in worse shape, and they are more prone to violence thus putting her and the potential offspring in danger.

But what do we see? Women lined up to buy books like "How to tame the bad boy" and "bad boys and the women that love them" like you can reset the male like he's just got a switch that needs flipping! Let me make this perfectly clear women...men? We really aren't that fucking hard to figure out, we really aren't. We really were never good at manipulation anyway so when a man tries its hamhanded and sloppy, so with men what you see? What you get.

At least with us guys are drives are as simple as we are. Some like big titties, some like a nice ass, some like nice legs, and most of us like a woman that can make something to eat and don't bitch constantly. Again simple and predictable is the male.

So if women are happier it has to be a "delusional crazy woman" gene, because I have seen women in truly shitastic relationships that just smile away, they are just sure they are gonna "fix" him like a 75 Dodge that needs a rebuild. If guys aren't as happy its simply because we don't lie to ourselves, that all. And again like deception our self lies are as hamhanded and unbelievable as Will Shatner's rug, so naturally even we don't buy it.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[sheetsda]

Pregnant women still seek sex.

I heard this explained recently using the example of horses (I think this came from a cracked article, so take it with a grain of salt). If there are multiple males around and a male will kill any offspring perceived not to be his own, then the female will mate with all the available males so that they all perceive the offspring as their own. Obviously this is not perfectly applicable to modern humans, but it doesn't seem far fetched that the biological urge would still be buried in our DNA somewhere.

The logical course of action then is for sex-deprived people to start killing all offspring that isn't theirs so that the opposite sex will put out more for fear of not passing on their genes.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[davester666]

Dammit. Now I'm humming "Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate".

It'll take me weeks to get that out of my head again.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[Max Rool]

And now.... It's not just you. Thank you for that.

Re:you fail at biology forever

[marcello_dl]

A thread about sex on slashdot is like a thread about cannibalism in a vegan forum.

Achievement disparity

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this be a major contributor to the disparity in achievement between men and women? Women have achieved great things as scientists, CEOs, politicians, and in many other areas. Despite this, by and large, men strive for achievement more than women (as a group). Is it because men, on average, are less content? Could this be the primary motivating factor for men to achieve greater things than their predecessors? Perhaps men then to just "want it" more than women. I'm not denying that discrimination and disenfranchisement are contributing factors, but maybe they don't play as big a role as people think.

Re:Achievement disparity

[sandytaru]

I'm a fairly happy woman (also pretty hard to get upset) and I still dream of big things. But I'm content so long as I have my creature comforts. Even if I never achieve my most ambitious dreams (like working for NASA), I'm happy just having reached some smaller goals (writing a novel, going to graduate school, finding a nice guy to marry, buying a house, etc.) So I do think that the yearning, the desire for more and better things, that some men and women experience is definitely a factor in their level of happiness.

They identified the shape of the gene

[rullywowr]

...and it looked like a very large princess cut diamond set in a bed of milk chocolate.

The Results Were Skewed

[guttentag]

Sally Albright: Most women at one time or another have faked it.
Harry Burns: Well, they haven't faked it with me.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because I know.
Sally Albright: Oh. Right. Thats right. I forgot. Youre a man.
Harry Burns: What was that supposed to mean?
Sally Albright: Nothing. Its just that all men are sure it never happened to them and all women at one time or other have done it so you do the math.

The odds are the women were faking happiness during the study. You do the math. In the mean time, I'll have what she's having.

Happiness deemed harmful

[Anonymous Coward]

Happiness undoubtedly is largely a physiological characteristic of a person. The question is then, why didn't evolution sort the genes out so that we would be happy most of the time? The obvious answer is that happiness isn't a good thing for the survival of the individual.

I believe we were "created" to strive to be happy, but we weren't "meant" to be happy except for some fleeting, orgastic moments. Happiness is the carrot, suffering is the stick that propels us to survive and procreate. Pain is there to make us suffer but so is love, which is definitely not meant to make us happy but rather sacrifice our wellbeing for that of another individual.

Humans are constantly trying to cheat nature. Alcohol, opium, cocaine etc make us happy, so happy that we don't care if we starve, if we stink, if we contract a disease.

So some women naturally produce antidepressants?

[RMingin]

I thought this sounded familiar.

MAOA = Monoamine Oxidase A.

MAOI = Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor, a common class of antidepressant.

So in people with low-expression (doesn't make much) genes for MAOA, they have less of this depression-causing gene, and are happier. For everyone else, have some of this over-prescribed medication!

This sounds very much like "research" which was heavily funded by a pharmaceutical company that makes lots of MAOIs.

Breaking news! People with fewer natural antidepressant genes are more depressed! Have some moclobemide!

The only interesting thing for me here is that these MAOA genes seem to only work as described in women.

happy genes

[indy_Muad'Dib]

sadly the gene is 3 sizes too small and no one can fit into them.