The genetic architecture of psychophysiological phenotypes

It is now clear that almost all complex traits have a highly polygenic component; that is, their genetic basis consists of relatively frequent risk alleles at a very large number of loci, each making a small contribution to variation, or disease susceptibility. This general conclusion appears to hold for intermediate phenotypes. Therefore, we should not expect these phenotypes to be associated with substantially larger effect sizes than conventional phenotypes. Instead, their usefulness is likely to lie in understanding the mechanism underpinning associations identified via genome-wide association studies of conventional phenotypes.