A new paper in an upcoming edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that people who worry and have a tendency to be anxious actually might be more intelligent.
The Huffington Post explained how the results came about:
A team led by Alexander Penney of Ontario’s Lakehead Universitypeople who worry and have a tendency to be anxious actually might be more intelligent. gave 126 undergrads a litany of surveys and questionnaires designed to measure both their intelligence and how much they tended to stress about events in their lives. (For instance, they were asked how strongly they agreed with statements like, “I am always worried about something.”) After analyzing the results, Penney and his team found a correlation between worrying and verbal intelligence.
This correlation doesn’t imply that one causes the other, but the connection has been researched and documented before. Interestingly, Penney and the team found an alternative connection as well. Apparently people who said they replayed past events over in their minds ranked lower on the non-verbal intelligence scale. They explained this finding:
“It is possible that more verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry. Individuals with higher non-verbal intelligence may be stronger at processing the non-verbal signals from individuals they interact with in the moment, leading to a decreased need to re-process past social encounters.”
Clearly, worrying and being anxious isn’t a desirable thing. In fact, it can be really debilitating. But perhaps a slight intellectual ego boost can be the silver lining.
