Anxiety Predicts Intelligence: Worriers Have Higher IQs

It hasn't seemed smart to worry. But actually worriers are intelligent, according to mindbodygreen.com.

The discovery was made by a research team led by Alexander Penney of Lakehead University in Ontario. After testing 126 undergraduates on diverse aspects, such as anxiety, verbal skills, social phobia, memories and non-verbal intelligence, it discovered that worrying could be a sign of intelligence. Verbal intelligence is tied up with language-based reasoning, while non-verbal IQ is linked with "hands-on and visual reasoning."

According to sciencedirect.com, in an upcoming edition of the journal Personality and Individual Difference, earlier research has indicated that anxiety and depression symptoms have negative links with intelligence, but the research does not take "state distress and test anxiety" as important. New research on the other hand indicates some link between generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), worry, and intelligence.

Those persons who reported that their worry was higher, also seemed to score higher on the verbal intelligence test. On the other hand, those who dwelt on the past said that they were exhibited less marks on the non-verbal intelligence test.

The findings seem to be logical, according to mindbodgreen.com. Students who are "verbally intelligent" would naturally turn to events of the past to indicate solutions in the present instead of trying to look for fresh evidence, while "non-verbally intelligent" persons would be searching for solutions in events that occur in the present, at the time of the problem, without really looking for a solution in their past.

The sample used, though, was "small and non-clinical" and not really representative. Still, the research is being looked as compulsive enough to find something positive in worrying. While the past should not become an obsession, it could help you to arrive at smarter solutions if you look at it wisely.

An earlier research held that while anxiety can lead to some disablement of action, and worries could be irrational, sometimes there could be "wild-card danger", which makes too much worry important. Such worries would help people to preserve their own as well as their offsprings' lives, according to livescience.com.