“A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of Human Assortative Mating in 22 Complex Traits”, 2022-03-20 (; similar):
Assortative mating (AM) occurs when the correlation for a trait between mates is larger than would be expected by chance. AM can increase the genetic and environmental variation of traits, can increase the prevalence of disorders in a population, and can bias estimates in genetically informed designs.
In this study, we conducted the largest set of meta-analyses on human AM published to date.
Across 22 traits, meta-analyzed correlations ranged from r = 0.08 to r = 0.58, with social attitude, substance use, and cognitive traits showing the highest correlations and personality, disorder, and biometrical traits generally yielding smaller but still positive and nominally statistically-significant (p < 0.05) correlations.
We observed high between-study heterogeneity for most traits, which could have been the result of phenotypic measurement differences between samples and/or differences in the degree of AM across time or cultures.