I have written about mental health from a multitude of different angles over the past couple of years. One of my most recent articles is about the effect our environments have on our mental wellbeing; this month, I am taking a look at sociogenomics and the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.
Understanding Sociogenomics
“Nature and nurture aren’t separate forces, they’re a Möbius strip, endlessly looping back on each other… It’s a continuous feedback loop, in which neither nature nor nurture is a fixed entity.” (Conley, 2025)
Sociogenomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that examines how genetic factors interact with social environments to influence human behaviours and health outcomes. By integrating principles from sociology, genomics, and psychology, sociogenomics seeks to understand the complex interplay between our genetic makeup and the social contexts we navigate daily (Steff, 2023).
At its core, it examines how social environments and interactions can affect the way genes are expressed. While the DNA sequence itself remains unchanged, environmental factors such as stress, social isolation, or supportive relationships can lead to variations in gene expression. This means that our social experiences can activate or deactivate certain genes, influencing various biological processes and potentially impacting our health and behaviour (Conley, 2025).
Genetics and Social Outcomes
Recent research in sociogenomics is uncovering how our genetic predispositions can influence not only our own mental health but also the well-being of those around us. One emerging area of study suggests that a spouse’s genetic risk for depression may affect their partner’s mental health through shared behaviours and environments. As highlighted in The New York Times by Dalton Conley (2025), an individual’s risk of depression is shaped not just by their own genetic makeup but also by that of their partner, whose genetic tendencies can subtly shape the emotional and social context of the relationship.
This finding is reinforced by a study in EBioMedicine (Zeng et al., 2016), which concluded that both shared genetic factors and the couple’s environment significantly contribute to the risk of depression. The research illustrates how interconnected our biological and relational lives truly with our genes influencing the environments we co-create, and those environments, in turn, affecting how our genes are expressed.
Sociogenomics challenges our traditional understanding of personal setbacks and psychological conditions by revealing just how tightly genetic predispositions and life circumstances are intertwined. It’s well established that adverse life events such as the loss of a job or a relationship can trigger depression. But what’s more startling is emerging evidence that individuals with a higher genetic propensity for depression are also more likely to experience these very setbacks in the first place. This doesn’t suggest fault or inevitability, but rather illuminates a feedback loop: the way we’re wired may subtly influence the types of environments we find ourselves in, which then reinforce or exacerbate those genetic tendencies (Rauf & Freese, 2024).
In this way, genetic risk becomes not just a personal matter but a social one that is embedded in networks of influence that span households, peer groups, and communities. These findings underscore the need to approach mental health through an integrated lens that accounts for the biological, environmental, and social contexts that shape human experience.
Implications for the Mental Health Sector
Recognizing the sociogenomic interplay in individuals and between partners offers valuable insights for mental health interventions. Couples therapy, in particular, could benefit from a more integrated approach; one that considers how genetic predispositions and shared environments influence emotional well-being. By addressing both relationship dynamics and underlying biological factors, therapists may be able to help reduce the risk or severity of depression within partnerships. This perspective also highlights the importance of creating environments that help buffer genetic vulnerabilities. Encouraging open communication, mutual support, and healthy coping mechanisms can significantly mitigate the influence of genetic risk on mental health outcomes (Zeng et al., 2016).
Despite growing interest, genetic testing remains a limited tool in routine mental health care and is still primarily focused on medication response. Tests like GeneSight are gaining traction by offering a more personalized approach by guiding medication choices through predicting how individuals metabolize certain drugs. However, such testing has yet to be widely adopted for use in broader diagnosis or prevention due to challenges such as the complexity of mental health disorders that makes it difficult to draw clear conclusions from genetic tests alone. The absence of standardized clinical guidelines and ongoing ethical concerns, such as privacy, discrimination, and the emotional implications of genetic risk, further complicate their integration into practice (Rauf & Freese, 2024).
Still, as sociogenomic research advances and ethical frameworks evolve, the role of genetics in mental health care is likely to expand, enabling more targeted, compassionate, and informed treatment approaches.
Limitations & Ethics
While sociogenomics provides compelling insights into how genes and environments interact to shape human behaviour, the field is not without significant limitations. Many of the traits it aims to explain, such as depression, educational attainment, or social mobility, are not found in single genes and are heavily influenced by contextual factors, including socioeconomic status, culture, and family environment. This complexity makes it challenging to isolate specific causal pathways or apply findings broadly across diverse populations. Compounding this, most genome-wide association studies have focused predominantly on individuals of European ancestry, limiting the reliability of findings for other populations and risking the reinforcement of existing inequities in health and education (Steff, 2023).
Another key challenge in sociogenomics lies in the interpretation and application of genetic scores. While these scores can correlate with certain traits, they are not deterministic and explain only a limited portion of outcome variability. Yet as genetic testing becomes more accessible, the risk of over-reliance grows, particularly if such data are used indiscriminately in settings like school admissions, insurance coverage, or the criminal justice system. Without careful regulation, these tools could reinforce genetic determinism and exacerbate social inequities. Wealthier families, with earlier access to screening, may gain further advantage, potentially encoding inequality into biology itself. These concerns, ranging from consent and privacy to discrimination, highlight the urgent need for principled, ethical oversight to ensure that genetic insights are used to inform and support, rather than categorize or exclude (Steff, 2023).
While dystopian visions like Brave New World represent an extreme and unlikely outcome, they serve as cautionary tales that underscore the importance of ethical reflection as genetic technologies evolve. With careful consideration and thoughtful oversight, genetic insights have the potential to inform more personalized and preventative approaches to mental health and well-being. The promise of sociogenomics may lie not in prediction or classification, but in enriching our understanding of the complex relationship between nature and nurture, and in shaping a society that engages both thoughtfully and with compassion.
Bibliography
Conley, D. (2025). A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/opinion/genetics-nature-nurture-sociogenomics.html
Rauf, T., & Freese, J. (2024). Genetic influences on depression and selection into adverse life experiences. Social Science & Medicine, 344, 116633.
Steff, B. (2023). Sociogenomics: The intricate science of how genetics influences sociology. Purdue University Newsroom. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2023/Q2/sociogenomics-the-intricate-science-of-how-genetics-influences-sociology
Zeng, Y., Navarro, P., Xia, C., Amador, C., Fernandez-Pujals, A. M., Thomson, P. A., Campbell, A., Nagy, R., Clarke, T.-K., Hafferty, J. D., Smith, B. H., Hocking, L. J., Padmanabhan, S., Hayward, C., MacIntyre, D. J., Porteous, D. J., Haley, C. S., & McIntosh, A. M. (2016). Shared genetics and couple-associated environment are major contributors to the risk of both clinical and self-declared depression. EBioMedicine, 14, 161–167.