Ouch

1/ 🚨New paper in Nature Genetics Genetic factors are associated with the educational fields people study, from arts to engineering. Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... FAQ: www.thehastingscenter.org/genomic-find...

Better schools can compensate for dispositions

Excited to share this work led by @cktamnes.bsky.social (and featuring many colleagues from PROMENTA at @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social) exploring the links between psychological wellbeing and illbeing across biological, developmental, societal and intervention perspectives

Very cool!

New blog post! Let's say you have two measures meant to capture the same confounder. They're highly correlated. Can you still proceed with your regression analysis? (I admit, the title is a bit of a spoiler) www.the100.ci/2025/10/13/i...

Two birds of a gene - catch Matt Keller's webinar at @uio.no on October 15th. Please share www.sv.uio.no/promenta/eng... @ispg.bsky.social @behaviorgenetic.bsky.social @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social @essgn.bsky.social @ibg.colorado.edu

It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions

PsyPost did a piece on our recent study on assortative mating. Check out the full paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our fragmentation paper is now finally out! I put some of the dumb quips that didn't make the cut in the alt texts. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨 New preprint out! We reconstructed parental haplotypes in >440k individuals (UK & Estonian biobanks) to estimate assortative mating directly in the parental generation. This reveals intensified assortment in recent generations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The largest study on late life virginity, based on >400k individuals, out now in @pnas.org Open access link: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Shoutout to shared first author @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social ❤️ Thread below 👇🏽

I tried making a figure explaining how the sum of variances law can be understood as the diagonal of a bivariate normal, and how a correlation between the two antecedent variables — such as under assortative mating — will result in greater variance and more cases above a threshold.

First, it is important to note that “assortative mating” is not synonymous with “partner similarity”. Instead, assortment is only one of several processes that can lead to partner similarity, the others being convergence, stratification, and inbreeding.

We have a new paper out, led by the great @hfsunde.bsky.social! We find that the correlation between parental income and offspring mental disorders may be partly causal in adolescence (phenotypic transmission), but that it is largely explained by passive genetic transmission in adulthood.

Accompanying the paper is an interactive web page with figures and tables showing the prevalence of psychological codes in the ICPC-2 by age, sex, and parental income quartile. Check it out here: hfsu.shinyapps.io/prevalence_b...

Our new paper is out today! 🎉 In it, we use administrative register data to document how psychiatric disorders are strongly linked to parental income, from childhood far into adulthood. Furthermore, we attempt to separate causation and selection using kinship-based models. doi.org/10.1111/jcpp...

🚨📜 Debut publication alert! Do genetics influence education differently across state borders? 🧬📚 We tested differences in genetic associations with education in East and West 🇩🇪 around reunification! Out now in Psychological Science 👉 doi.org/10.1177/0956... #Sociogenomics #MPRGBiosocial #MPIB A🧵

A must-read piece by @sashagusevposts.bsky.social I'll be That Guy™ and point out that this is why highly distributed pedigrees are used in evolution and animal breeding in nonexperimental settings. Sibs alone (esp. twins) give bad estimates. Good to see human gen getting on board.

🚨New preprint is out! How do genetic effects on complex traits change with age? In this work, we compare different approaches to obtain age-varying genetic effects, and show how design and modeling choices can impact the conclusions we draw. shorturl.at/17snd A thread 🧵👇

Sasha writes about our new study (led by bluesky-less Nikolai Eftedal) where we show how simple genetic models don't adequately fit correlations between multiple types of relatives. The mismatch between observed and expected correlations are interesting, which are explained well in his blog post:

I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:

We have a new preprint: this work is especially dear to my heart, as it results from the data collection pipeline we established at the Netherlands Twin Register, which enabled us to collect Facebook posts and likes (paid for with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears...) osf.io/preprints/ps...

Nice confirmation of a commonly believed theory of why people in the Nordics generally speak English so well compared to central and southern Europe.

Our new study is just out in Psychological Science! We study cognitive ability at age 18 and mental health 20 years later in 270k Norwegian men. We include different mental disorders, compare education by ability, and run sibling-fixed effects. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1177/0956...

New paper on family resemblance in school performance! We find that a model with only additive genetics and assortative mating fits the data well, but underestimates the resemblance of close relatives and adoptees, indicating some shared environmental effects. See @eivindy.bsky.social thread!

Studying the genetics of intelligence measures can help us understand the neurobiology of cognition and neurodevelopmental conditions 🧬🧠 We estimated missing intelligence test scores in @ukbiobank.bsky.social to reduce bias and boost power. Preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread 👇

Our new paper was just published! It has all the right ingredients: - Behavioural genetics ✅ - Assortative mating ✅ - Discussions about nature-nurture of social outcomes ✅ - "Things are complicated"-conclusion ✅ - Summary statistics available for reanalysis! ✅ See Eivind's thread for more.

1) LCAs are designed to find classes. So when a paper's Aim I is "We'll use LCA to see if there are classes", it's like saying "We're going to estimate a mean and see if there's an SD". It's that dumb

🧵 THREAD: Preprint from @chrisrayner.bsky.social reveals how to fix selection bias in the Norwegian #MoBa study using population-wide registry data! For the first time, we can quantify and adjust for selection bias in this major epidemiological resource. Spread the good news! osf.io/preprints/os...

Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Not to brag, but I've never shortened assortative mating to AM in my papers. Weird flex, I know, but also a low bar...

Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Relationships are often built on shared values and beliefs, but what happens when political preferences create a divide? @brunoarpino.bsky.social and I investigated how political (mis)match affects union dissolution in @readdemography.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

In Oslo? We've got your plans sorted for Thursday and Friday 👇

Examining the sensitivity for environmental influences by conducting a GWAS on differences between identical twins - very clever design! Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com : www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper on indirect assortative mating is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! In it, we provide refined definitions of terms used to explain partner similarity, develop statistical models, and find evidence of surprisingly high social homogamy for education. Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Amazing new documentary on an old (alleged) scientific fraud case — the Baltimore affair — and a brilliant example of what is possible when independent creators are unconstrained by the requirements of linear TV or the YouTube algorithm. Go throw money at Nebula and watch the whole thing!

I literally had two independent discussions about this just this week. Contra my intuition, very interesting to see that it apparently does not work.

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social Highlights ⬇

Begynner å bli en trend m mer Dagbladet-aktige overskrifter på nrk no, men dette r den aller dagbladetskete overskriften jeg har sett hittil, når man velger seg ut et sitat som forteller leseren ABSOLUTT INGENTING om saken som vi ikke allerede fikk m oss fra stikktittelen. www.nrk.no/norge/mener-...

We have an exciting new paper in PNAS on the stability of cognitive ability between infancy (7-9 months of age) and adulthood (~age 30). 1/4 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is the type of discussions people need to have if they can not trust their government anymore. Meanwhile, in Norway, civilians give the government access to all their healthcare data and we have hugely valuable research on the entire population.

In Oslo? We still have some seats left for our conference on Social Science and Genetics on the 12-13th June! More info and registration: www.sv.uio.no/psi/english/... @uio.no

1/2; Check out our new paper on #Dizygotic #Twinning and female #fertility: doi.org/10.1007/s108... In this collaboration from @ntrbiopsy.bsky.social and the Norwegian #MoBa study, we use several genetically informed methods to investigate the genetic architecture of DZ Twinning.

Very grateful that I got to present at the ESSGN past Friday. In the study I presented, we looked at intergenerational transmission of education in a sample of the Norwegian population register. We used a Children-of-Twins model to look at GPA at age 16 and educational attainment in the parents.

Slight FOMO at the moment, but very interesting. Any more details?

You will have seen this post by @tedmond.bsky.social‬ on our new GWAS of Personality. He says you should read the paper (you should), I want to write a thread to entice you. Because social media has shredded your attention as it has mine, I promise there is JUICE & BEEF in this thread!

Probably the most important paper in personality psych this decade just dropped. 👀 Interesting genetic correlations between other traits (the #1 reason for GWASs on social traits IMO), and evidence of weak but non-zero assortative mating on personality.

Nice! Add a special relatedness matrix for cross-chromosome correlations to estimate the extra heritability due to assortative mating. Much larger contribution for educational attainment than for fluid IQ. www.nature.com/articles/s41...