13th Annual IGSS Conference • September 30-October 1, 2022

Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences 2022

With this Genotype, I Thee Wed: Indirect Genetic Effects on Depression Between Spouses

Dalton Conley, Department of Sociology, Princeton University

Most recent research on indirect genetic effects in humans has focused on genetic nurture—that is, the effects of parental genotypes on offspring phenotypes. Some recent work has examined the effect of offspring genotypes on parental behavior. But few researchers have looked at indirect genetic effects between spouses. Those few papers that do have deployed research designs that make it difficult to distinguish between spousal assortment and spousal convergence. To address this lacuna, in the present paper we deploy data from the Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to separate spousal selection, social genetic effects, and active rGE in mate selection with respect to depression. MoBa and FHS have a pedigree structure that allows us to separate out direct genotypic effects among spouses from stratification (by allowing us to control for the parental genotype of spouses).

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