The Big Five personality traits, also known as the OCEAN model, are a widely accepted framework for understanding human personality.
These five traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) are moderately heritable and have been previously shown to interact and associate with mental health.
A study led by Yale School of Medicine scientists and published in Nature Human Behavior investigated the complex underlying genetic architecture of these five personality traits in cohorts of up to 682,688 people.
The researchers were able to replicate prior findings from the literature and discover novel genetic variations corresponding to each trait. They used these results to examine the overlap between personality and mental health related traits, finding substantial positive relationships between neuroticism with depression and anxiety while agreeableness provided protective effects for both.
First author was Priya Gupta, PhD, postdoctoral associate. Senior author was Daniel F. Levey, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry.