Research Reveals Heritability of Name-Liking, Subjective Well-being, and Their Association

Jul 18, 2014     Email"> PrintText Size

Name-liking is one’s attitude toward or liking for one’s own name or letters in one’s name. Researchers have consistently observed that people tend to view their name or name letters in a positive light, regardless of culture, ethnicity, language or cohort. More fascinating, name-liking has been found to have important adaptive value. For instance, it is positively associated with subjective well-being. Given its importance and prevalence, people may wonder whether it is heritable and further, whether its association with well-being is also genetically based. To address these questions, a research group led by Professor CAI Huajian employed a twin study to analyze name-liking, subjective well-being (including life satisfaction and affective well-being) and their relationship. 

Given that Chinese names are not letter-based but character-based and there is no relevant research on name-liking as well as its link with subjective well-being in China, the researchers carried out two pilot studies to identify the importance of names to Chinese and the correlation between name-liking and subjective well-being in China. The twin study involved 152 monozygotic and 152 dizygotic twin pairs from Beijing, with an average age of 18. Each participant completed scales of name-liking and subjective well-being. The researchers demonstrated considerable heritability of name-liking (47%), with zero shared environmental influence but large non-shared environmental influence (53%). They also discovered moderate heritability of subjective well-being (33%) for both life satisfaction and affective well-being. More interesting, they found modest to moderate genetic (.21–.41), as well as non-shared environmental (.14–.22), correlations between name-liking and subjective well-being.

These findings provided novel understanding about name-liking as well as its relationship with subjective well-being. This is the first evidence of the heredity of name-liking. It is also the first time to reveal the heritability of subjective well-being in Chinese culture. Given that name-liking reflects implicit self-esteem, the finding suggests that implicit self-esteem may also be partly heritable. More important, the discovery of genetic, as well as non-shared environmental, overlap between name-liking and subjective well-being implies that some genes and non-shared environments influence both name-liking and subjective well-being, providing evidence for the inherent nature behind this link. 

This research was funded by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-EW-J-8), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31300871), and the Hundred Talents Program (Y1CX153003).