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Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity
Partners are often similar in terms of their physical and behavioural traits, such as their education, political affiliation and height. However, it is currently unclear what exactly causes this similarity—partner choice, partner influence increasing similarity over time or confounding factors such...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10202815/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36928782 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01500-w |
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author | Sjaarda, Jennifer Kutalik, Zoltán |
author_facet | Sjaarda, Jennifer Kutalik, Zoltán |
author_sort | Sjaarda, Jennifer |
collection | PubMed |
description | Partners are often similar in terms of their physical and behavioural traits, such as their education, political affiliation and height. However, it is currently unclear what exactly causes this similarity—partner choice, partner influence increasing similarity over time or confounding factors such as shared environment or indirect assortment. Here, we applied Mendelian randomization to the data of 51,664 couples in the UK Biobank and investigated partner similarity in 118 traits. We found evidence of partner choice for 64 traits, 40 of which had larger phenotypic correlation than causal effect. This suggests that confounders contribute to trait similarity, among which household income, overall health rating and education accounted for 29.8, 14.1 and 11.6% of correlations between partners, respectively. Finally, mediation analysis revealed that most causal associations between different traits in the two partners are indirect. In summary, our results show the mechanisms through which indirect assortment increases the observed partner similarity. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10202815 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-102028152023-05-24 Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity Sjaarda, Jennifer Kutalik, Zoltán Nat Hum Behav Article Partners are often similar in terms of their physical and behavioural traits, such as their education, political affiliation and height. However, it is currently unclear what exactly causes this similarity—partner choice, partner influence increasing similarity over time or confounding factors such as shared environment or indirect assortment. Here, we applied Mendelian randomization to the data of 51,664 couples in the UK Biobank and investigated partner similarity in 118 traits. We found evidence of partner choice for 64 traits, 40 of which had larger phenotypic correlation than causal effect. This suggests that confounders contribute to trait similarity, among which household income, overall health rating and education accounted for 29.8, 14.1 and 11.6% of correlations between partners, respectively. Finally, mediation analysis revealed that most causal associations between different traits in the two partners are indirect. In summary, our results show the mechanisms through which indirect assortment increases the observed partner similarity. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-03-16 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10202815/ /pubmed/36928782 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01500-w Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Sjaarda, Jennifer Kutalik, Zoltán Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
title | Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
title_full | Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
title_fullStr | Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
title_full_unstemmed | Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
title_short | Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
title_sort | partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10202815/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36928782 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01500-w |
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