[pfisherman]

Looks like the statistical geneticists have jumped the shark with this one. This big problem here is that their endpoint (chills) is poorly defined, reported by subjects (and thus highly subjective), and not measured using any type of validated instrument. So I question whether they might be fitting a model to noise here.

In the land of drug development patient reported outcomes, even when captured with meticulously designed instruments in prospectively designed clinical trails, are notorious for being noisy and confounded by the placebo effect.

[dekhn]

I had a similar experience in my genetics class in grad school- the professor explained that children of musicians were more likely to have perfect pitch, hence it was a genetic trait. Some folks suggested that perhaps it was possible that children of musicians were subjected to lots of labelled and unlabelled training data (musical notes) making it "environment" rather than genetic.

[sidewndr46]

I pretty much figure from the title it's self reported and yep: "We gather self-reports from a genotyped sample of thousands of partly related individuals from the Netherland".

And the author summary goes on to state: "Many people experience chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing art. Yet not everyone feels these reactions in the same way.". So the subjects aren't even self reporting the same thing.

[bonsai_spool]

> In the land of drug development [...]

Fine, but this is the land of genome-wide association studies. I am unaware of any overlap, considering that such 'GWAS' studies require tens or hundreds of thousands of participants to get any definitive signal... Such work is the nature of statistical genetics.

> So I question whether they might be fitting a model to noise here.

On what basis?