Worriers Are More Perceptive and More Intelligent

A propensity to worry indicates a strong ability to consider the past and future in precise detail, perhaps explaining why worriers also tend to be more intelligent.

While worriers have often been considered a liability to groups of professionals and friends alike, due to their apparent lack of confidence, they may be better at learning from past mistakes than others, and preparing for future threats. 

Researchers have recently found that worriers are better at telling when others are lying and are quicker at detecting threats, such as smoke in the room caused by a fire elsewhere. Now, a survey of one hundred students at MacEwan University has shown that worrying goes hand in hand with having a higher intelligence.

[Worriers] may be better at learning from past mistakes than others, and preparing for future threats.

People who self-identified as worriers or said they tend to think about their own sadness also scored higher on tests of verbal intelligence, taken from the well-known Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. But worriers should rejoice just yet.

The test also showed that “a tendency to dwell on past social events was negatively correlated with non-verbal intelligence (that is, those students who dwelt more on past events scored lower on non-verbal IQ).”

Howard Gardner explains that an IQ is one of several kinds of intelligence, and that we prioritize different intelligences over time: