Association of Self-esteem with Mental Health and Personality: The Contribution of Genetic and Environmental Factors

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Abstract
Individuals with high self-esteem experience less social anxiety, fewer depressive symptoms, and exhibit lower neuroticism and higher extraversion. We aimed to explore the genetic and environmental influences behind these associations. Self-esteem, four mental health indicators, and five personality factors were assessed in 1,288 Finnish young adult twins, including 583 complete pairs. The mean age of the participants was 21.9 years (SD = 0.8). Classical twin modelling was used to estimate genetic and environmental correlations. Additionally, regression models were used to examine the association between self-esteem and polygenic scores (PGS) of several mental health traits. Among all participants, self-esteem associated positively with extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and negatively with depressive symptoms, alexithymia, schizotypal personality, overall mental health problems and neuroticism. These associations were explained by additive genetic factors (19–66% of covariation) and unique environmental factors (36–81% of covariation) when using twin modelling. Self-esteem correlated only with the PGS of subjective well-being in men and women. The proportion of variance of self-esteem explained by the PGSs was minor (1.5% or less). These findings suggest that while self-esteem shares a genetic background with mental health and personality traits, unique environmental factors can also influence these connections. Our findings are consistent with a hypothesis that enhancing self-esteem can have a positive impact on mental health.
Funding Information
  • University of Helsinki

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