Polygenic score for educational attainment captures DNA variants shared between personality traits and educational achievement.

Abstract

Genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS) can be used to predict individual genetic risk and resilience. For example, a GPS for years of education (EduYears) explains substantial variance in cognitive traits such as general cognitive ability and educational achievement. Personality traits are also known to contribute to individual differences in educational achievement. However, the association between EduYears GPS and personality traits remains largely unexplored. Here, we test the relation between GPS for EduYears, neuroticism, and well-being, and 6 personality and motivation domains: Academic Motivation, Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Agreeableness. The sample was drawn from a U.K.-representative sample of up to 8,322 individuals assessed at age 16. We find that EduYears GPS was positively associated with Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Academic Motivation, predicting between 0.6% and 3% of the variance. In addition, we find that EduYears GPS explains between 8% and 16% of the association between personality domains and educational achievement at the end of compulsory education. In contrast, both the neuroticism and well-being GPS significantly accounted for between 0.3% and 0.7% of the variance in a subset of personality domains. Furthermore, they did not significantly account for any of the covariance between the personality domains and achievement, with the exception of the neuroticism GPS explaining 5% of the covariance between Neuroticism and achievement. These results demonstrate that the genetic effects of educational attainment relate to personality traits, highlighting the multifaceted nature of EduYears GPS.

Academic Achievement, Self-Concept, Personality and Emotional Intelligence in Primary Education. Analysis by Gender and Cultural Group

“…In this respect, the scientific literature shows studies that relate personality, through the five-factor model, with academic performance. Thus, agreeableness, and intellect/imagination (also known as openness) are related to academic performance (Poropat, 2009;Smith-Woolley et al, 2019). Specifically, conscientiousness predicts academic achievement (O Connor and Paunonen, 2007), which is expected to be found in the present study.…”

“…A review of the scientific literature has shown that many studies have analyzed the relationship between academic achievement and different psychological constructs such as self-concept (Susperreguy et al, 2018;Wolff et al, 2018;Sewasew and Schroeders, 2019), personality (Janošević and Petrović, 2019;Perret et al, 2019;Smith-Woolley et al, 2019), and emotional intelligence (Corcoran et al, 2018;Deighton et al, 2019;Piqueras et al, 2019). In this work, these psychological constructs are analyzed together with primary school children by gender and cultural group.…”

Comparing within- and between-family polygenic score prediction

“…The final GPS is obtained as the sum of the trait-increasing alleles (each variant coded as 0, 1, or 2), weighted by the posterior effect size estimates. In contrast to clumping and thresholding, LDpred retains all the SNPs in the polygenic score that are common between GWA summary statistics and genotype data in the target sample (for more details about this polygenic score calculation approach, see 15 ). In this study, we created polygenic scores using a prior that assumes a causal fraction of 1 for all analyses, based on the assumption that all genetic markers contribute to trait development.…”

“…SES) also contribute to the development of other behavioural traits through prGE mechanisms. Although it has been suggested that the widespread cross-trait associations between the EA GPS and various outcomes may be partly driven by prGE effects 15,22 , to our knowledge no study to date has tested this hypothesis.…”

“…The predictive power of the educational attainment GPS (EA GPS) is considerable in contrast to other GPS for behavioral traits. Notably, cross-trait analyses have revealed that EA GPS is widely associated with traits other than educational achievement, including intelligence 2,6,7 , socioeconomic status (SES) 8–11 , behaviour problems 12 , mental illness 13 , physical health 13 and personality 14,15 , in some cases accounting for as much as or more than the variance in cross-trait associations explained by the target GPS themselves 15,16 .…”