“A Genetic Perspective on the Relationship between Eudaimonic and Hedonic Well-Being”, 2018-03-15 (; similar):
Whether hedonism or eudaimonism are two distinguishable forms of well-being is a topic of ongoing debate.
To shed light on the relation between the two, large-scale available molecular genetic data were leveraged to gain more insight into the genetic architecture of the overlap between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Hence, we conducted the first genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of eudaimonic well-being (n ≈ 108k) and linked it to a GWAS of hedonic well-being (n = ~222k).
We identified the first 2 genome-wide statistically-significant independent loci for eudaimonic well-being and 6 independent loci for hedonic well-being. Joint analyses revealed a moderate phenotypic correlation (r = 0.53), but a high genetic correlation (rg = 0.78) between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being. For both traits we identified enrichment in the frontal cortex and cingulate cortex as well as the cerebellum to be top ranked. Bi-directional Mendelian Randomization analyses using two-sample MR indicated some evidence for a causal relationship from hedonic well-being to eudaimonic well-being whereas no evidence was found for the reverse. Additionally, genetic correlations patterns with a range of positive and negative related phenotypes were largely similar for hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.
Our results reveal a large genetic overlap between hedonism and eudaimonism.