Paare haben eher psychiatrische Störungen. Untersuchungen ergaben, dass die Mehrheit der psychiatrischen Störungen konsistente Ehegattenkorrelationen in den Nationen und über Generationen hinweg hat, was auf ihre Bedeutung für die Bevölkerungsdynamik psychiatrischer Störungen hinweist.

Trait similarities between spouses are a key factor that shapes the landscape of complex human traits. The driving force behind the spousal correlations can increase the overall prevalence of disorders, influence occurrences of comorbidities and bias estimations of genetic architectures. However, there is a lack of large-scale studies examining cultural differences and generational trends in spousal correlations for psychiatric disorders. Focusing on three national registries, we performed a large-scale analysis on spousal correlations across nine psychiatric disorders. We obtained the trait correlations from five million spousal pairs in Taiwan and then compared them with estimates from the Danish national registry (571,534 pairs) and with published results from the Swedish national registry (707,263 pairs). Generational changes in Taiwan for people born after the 1930s were investigated as well. We found that a majority of psychiatric disorders have consistent spousal correlations across nations and over generations, indicating their importance in the population dynamics of psychiatric disorders.

Those who suffer from a condition are able to empathise with others who also have the condition quell surprise.