An interview
We sat down with Uku Vainik during ECP20 to talk about his talk, titled “A Hundred Nuances of Personality (100NP), health records, and recent experiences for 77,000 genotyped participants of Estonian Biobank”. Uku is a health researcher at the University of Tartu and an adjunct professor at McGill University.
Read on to learn more about Uku’s academic and artistic interests!
Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you become interested in personality psychology?
I never thought I would be involved in psychology. However, I do remember moments in high school where I would show psychological interests. For example, our teacher observed a correlation between grades in history and maths in our class. Me and my classmate suspected that both courses relied strongly on logic and intelligence. But when there was time to choose my major, it was almost a random coin toss between philosophy and psychology.
Looking back, I'm happy I chose psychology. I like to be grounded through empirical data. I'm just fascinated how people behave and finding logical connections between them. I started my studies in psychology and just kept going. I've been branching out to the brain sciences and genetics, but I'm a psychologist at heart! So, understanding behaviour is the key for me.
Q: That’s great! Can you summarise the talk you gave at ECP20?
During my PhD and postdoc, I studied the associations that overeating and obesity have with personality, cognitive ability, and brain structure. But once you have examined as many correlations as I have, you start to ask – how do these correlations happen? What are the causal mechanisms? The implicit assumption as a psychologist is that personality traits cause obesity. Namely, that people have low conscientiousness, high neuroticism, poor self-control, and high stress. So, it seems natural that they have trouble resisting all these tasty temptations that our environment offers and end up developing obesity. But we do not know for sure! To test this, we need to run experiments and that is hard because it is difficult to experimentally change personality – it's possible, but it's expensive.
So, at one point I discovered that you can use genetics to do the experiments for you. This is possible because personality and health are partly driven by genetics. The rate of genetic propensity one gets from our parents is random. The genetic propensity we have is the sum of many small and randomised experiments at the level of each polymorphism. We can use this genetic “lottery” inside us as Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs). For instance, if someone has a genetic propensity for high Neuroticism, does this result in phenotypic obesity or smoking? If yes, then we can expect Neuroticism to cause obesity. This approach is called Mendelian randomisation.
Such genetic RCTs are only possible if we discover the particular polymorphisms predicting personality traits. However, personality Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have not found very much so far. My guess is that most biobanks have not prioritised personality measurement. We're trying to change that as we have over 75,000 participants in the Estonian Biobank for whom we have genetic data and who responded to a personality questionnaire. Hopefully, this allows us to find out more about genes and personality. If anyone reads this and wants to contribute personality and genetic data, please reach out! I am available on Twitter (@ukuv) or email (uku.vainik@ut.ee)
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
The field of understanding behaviour and genes is called behaviour genetics and relies a lot on twin work. It seems to be an occupation hazard as I recently got twins! So, the twins keep me busy mostly. Other than that, I like to make a bike ride or improve our family’s country house. I also like music – I have DJ-d contemporary world music (link here) and sung in a male choir. With kids, these things tend to become less common.
Q: What advice would you give younger researchers?
Talk to different people about your research, but also talk to lay people. You might get some very interesting insights from regular people that we in our ivory towers may not think about. I sometimes get questions from newspapers that are very insightful.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the scholars and researchers that have inspired you and your work?
Jüri Allik from University of Tartu, Estonia is a never-ending source of independent thought and historical knowledge. Lesley Fellows and Alain Dagher at Montreal Neurological Institute, Canada recognised the collaboration potential and agreed to work with a random Eastern European like me… He also ended up visiting me in Estonia! Tal Yarkoni isn't in academia anymore, but I really love his data-driven approach and no-nonsense analysis.