Emily A Willoughby

Biographic Data

ID1753632
NAMEEmily A Willoughby
GIVEN NAMESEmily A
FAMILY NAMEWilloughby
SIGNATUREWILLOUGHBY E A
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Minnesota
ORCID0000-0001-7559-1544
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS6
TOTAL CITATIONS4
AUTHOR COUNT6
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2018
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • The freedom to believe in free will: Evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral genetics

    Open AccessEmily A Willoughby, Alan C Love et al.ARTICLEPhilosophical Psychology2025

    Philosophers and psychologists alike have long debated the etiology of beliefs about human agency. Recently, empirical investigations have shown that lay beliefs about free will and determinism represent stable and important individual differences. Despite a perennial interest in the sources of agentic belief, genetic and environmental influences on such beliefs have never been studied. We administered a battery of items assessing these beliefs t…

  • Associations between common genetic variants and income provide insights about the socio-economic health gradient

    Open AccessHyeokmoon Kweon, Casper A P Burik et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2025Cited by: 2References: 54

    We conducted a genome-wide association study on income among individuals of European descent ( N = 668,288) to investigate the relationship between socio-economic status and health disparities. We identified 162 genomic loci associated with a common genetic factor underlying various income measures, all with small effect sizes (the Income Factor). Our polygenic index captures 1–5% of income variance, with only one fourth due to direct genetic eff…

  • Genetics of monozygotic twins reveals the impact of environmental sensitivity on psychiatric and neurodevelopmental phenotypes

    Open AccessElham Assary, Jonathan R I Coleman et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2025References: 48

    Individual sensitivity to environmental exposures may be genetically influenced. This genotype-by-environment interplay implies differences in phenotypic variance across genotypes, but these variants have proven challenging to detect. Genome-wide association studies of monozygotic twin differences are conducted through family-based variance analyses, which are more robust to the systemic biases that impact population-based methods. We combined da…

  • The association between saving disposition and financial distress: A genetically informed approach

    Open AccessAlexandros Giannelis, Emily A Willoughby et al.ARTICLEJournal of Economic Psychology2023Cited by: 2References: 64

  • The role of the shared environment in college attainment: An adoption study

    Open AccessElise L Anderson, Gretchen R B Saunders et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality2021

    OBJECTIVE: College attainment is one of the few phenotypes to have substantial variance accounted for by environmental factors shared by reared-together relatives. The shared environment is implicated by the consistently strong parent-to-offspring transmission of college attainment. The mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. We use genetically informative methods with a longitudinal, adoption sample to identify possible environme…

  • Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals

    Open Access23andMe Research Team, James J Lee et al.ARTICLENature Genetics2018

    Here we conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identify 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant SNPs. For the SNPs taken together, we found evidence of heterogeneous effects across environments. The SNPs implicate genes involved in brain-development processes and neuron-to-neuron communication. In a separate analysis of the X chromosome, we identify…