The full results are not posted publicly and so were not available as a precomputed polygenic scores within Health and Retirement Study.

Stress is a well-known risk factor for the development of psychopathology (Harkness, Hayden, & Lopez-Duran, 2015). However, not everyone who is exposed to stress responds in the same way. Individual differences in resilience to stress reflect dynamic interpersonal and intrapersonal factors (Laird, Krause, Funes, & Lavretsky, 2019). Although resilience has been identified to be moderately heritable (30-50%; Boardman, Blalock, & Button, 2008), little is known about the genetic variants that may explain this heritability. While there has not yet been a robust genome-wide association study (GWAS) of resilience, existing GWAS of related phenotypes (proxies) may provide a starting point for developing our understanding of the molecular genetic underpinnings of the observed heritability of resilience. In a population sample of older US adults (N= 9,480), we examined the extent to which 32 polygenic proxy scores explained the variance in resilience. We then compared the utility of these existing genetic predictors to commonly examined demographic and psychological characteristics, such as socioeconomic status and social support. We found that the psychological correlates consistently and substantially outperformed existing polygenic scores. While psychological variables yielded substantial correlations with resilience, only four of the 32 polygenic scores reached significance but with relatively small effects. Our results indicate that existing polygenic scores are not sufficient to inform our understanding of resilience, nor would they be suitable predictors of individual differences in resilience outcomes. We conclude that a large-scale GWAS of resilience will be necessary to identify the specific genetics underlying the observed heritability of resilience.

No abstract