Approved research

Well-being, Mood, Health and Psychosocial Status

Lay summary

Happy people are healthy people. They live longer, function better, and are less susceptible to mental illness. In light of major global trends (e.g., rise of ageing populations, increasing longevity, decreasing birth rate), building and maintaining human health is crucial, but also becomes increasingly complex and demanding. We hypothesize that solutions to these major upcoming challenges may be more readily found when our research focus broadens and includes the genetic relation between Well-being, Mood, Health, and Psychosocial status. With this application we aim to disentangle causes of the observed association between well-being, mood, health and psychosocial status. Our aim is to identifying multifaceted genetic and environmental features of well-being, mood, health and psychosocial status and their overlap. Understanding these factors will benefit individuals at risk of developing mental illness and mental healthcare providers alike by identifying high-risk individuals and inform treatment options to reduce the negative impact of such behaviour for patients, family, friends, health care workers and society. We will first identify and investigate environmental components associated with well-being, mood, health and psychosocial status and their overlap. Following this we will look for potential genetic factors as well as gene-environment interactions associated with the proposed phenotypes. At last we will validate our findings on an independent dataset, such as the large prospective longitudinal database of the Netherlands Twin Register. We will include all genotyped individuals who completed questions related to well-being, mood, health and psychosocial status including cognitive functions and lifestyle.