While exercise gives you endorphins, endorphins make you happy, and happy people just don’t shoot their husbands, scientists from the Varna University of Management and Hong Kong Polytechnic University have discovered a much more direct route to happiness: your genes.
The team looked at data from three separate waves of the World Values Survey from the years 2000 to 2014, and calculated the average percentage of respondents from each country who reported themselves as being “very happy”. They then compared the happiness levels with a database maintained by Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale that tracks gene variations across populations, along with information concerning the harshness of summers and winters, the prevalence of pathogens, and World Bank economic data.
According to the paper, which can be found in the Journal of Happiness Studies, they discovered that the happiest and least happiest nations had different percentages of what is known as the A allele of the fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) gene variant rs324420—the specific version of the gene that helps prevent the breakdown of a pain-lowering and sensory-pleasure increasing substance known as anandamide.
It’s not all in the A allele
The nations that perceived themselves as being happiest—which included Ghana, Nigeria, Sweden, and northern Latin American nations like Mexico and Colombia—had the highest prevalence of the A allele. Meanwhile the nations where people were least likely to rate themselves as “very happy”—Iraq, Jordan, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and Taiwan—had the lowest presence of the A allele.
However, the authors also added that they think other issues impact happiness as well. For example, they posit that the economic and political issues facing Eastern European nations like Russia and Estonia have resulted in their very low happiness scores—despite the fact that such Eastern European nations actually have a fairly high prevalence of the A allele.
Moreover, climactic differences strongly linked to national happiness.
“We cannot fail to notice the high occurrence of the A allele in equatorial and tropical environments in the Americas and Africa and the lower occurrence of that allele around the Mediterranean Sea than in Northern Europe,” said co-author Michael Minkov of Varna University in a statement. “It seems that some equatorial and tropical environments select for a higher occurrence of the A allele as a counterbalance to environmental stressors.”
And if you’re from a country with low prevalence of the A allele—like Spain or Germany—or live in a country with a less than ideal climactic situation, the researchers stress that genes aren’t the only key to happiness.
“In other words, we have not shown that a nation’s genetic and climatic heritage doom a particular country to a specific happiness score, but that it can still rise and fall because of situational factors,” explained co-author Michael Bond of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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