Month: August 2023

The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ, a study finds.

High IQ may have a particularly strong link to curiosity because intelligence creates a ‘cognitive hunger’ — a desire to think.

Over the years, higher IQ drives people to keep exploring new experiences to satiate this hunger.

Curiosity, along with sensitivity to emotions, appreciation of beauty and an active fantasy life are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.

Being open to experience is so powerful that it is linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Children who scored higher on IQ tests at just 11-years-old were more open to experience when they were 50-years-old, the psychologists found.

The study’s authors explain their results:

“…childhood intelligence is indeed positively associated with adult trait Openness, even when it was assessed almost four decades earlier when participants were at 11 years.

Intelligence may influence the development of personality in that intelligent people develop habits to satisfy their curiosity and ‘‘cognitive hunger’’ which are an essential ingredient of Openness.”

The conclusions come from a huge study of 17,415 people born in the UK in one week in March 1958.

Over the following 50 years they were given various personality and intelligence tests.

Children with higher IQs were more open to experience because of higher motivation at school, greater support from their families and higher social status, the researchers found.

They explain how these factors fit together:

“Parents of higher socioeconomic status may foster children’s trait Openness by providing better resources such as choosing good schools and cultural environment (theaters, museums, traveling abroad, etc.); intelligent children tend to use more mental activities (such as abstract ideas, learning new
vocabularies, or math formulas) than those who are less intelligent; school settings (quality of teaching, good facilities) may enhance pupils to engage more in school learning.

All these three factors may influence educational and
occupational achievement, which in turn, may increase
the scores on Openness.”

In other words, they believe that it is a higher IQ that mainly drives the development of greater openness to experience.

The study was published in the Journal of Individual Differences (Furnham & Cheng, 2016).

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The surprising traits that indicate high intelligence.

Being genuine, cooperative and sincere are all linked to having a high IQ, research finds.

Although being ‘nice’ is not linked in the popular imagination with being intelligent, this study found that it was.

The study also found that half of the connection between high IQ and being ‘nice’ was down to genetics.

Other personality features that are linked to high IQ include being a seeker of variety, intellectually curious, imaginative and sensitive to emotions.

All of these are aspects of ‘openness to experience’, which is one of the five major aspects of personality.

Openness to experience is frequently strongly linked to high IQ by studies.

The study included 2,488 people who were given tests of personality and intelligence at 12 and 18-years-old.

Genetic modelling was used to examine the links between intelligence, personality and genes.

The results were explained by the study’s authors:

“Intelligence as measured by IQ was positively associated with
openness to experience and agreeableness.

Moderate phenotypic correlations [genetic associations] between agreeableness and IQ were also of interest.

Earlier studies reported small correlations between intelligence and agreeableness.

There have been a few studies on altruistic behavior in young children that found a positive relation with IQ.”

In fact, people with high IQs are better at working well with other people, other studies have found.

That is why those with high IQs are so essential: without them society would not work.

Being cooperative, in particular, may have strong links to higher IQ, the authors write:

“…unique aspects of human cognition are driven by social cooperation.

The cooperative attitudes of the subjects scoring high on agreeableness could therefore be the shared underlying factor in the relationship with IQ.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Bartels et al., 2012).

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People who are prone to this emotion feel more responsibility towards others.

People who are prone to anticipate feeling guilty are the most trustworthy, research finds.

Compared with other personality traits like openness, neuroticism and extraversion, it is guilt-proneness that best predicts people’s trustworthiness.

Anticipating guilt is key, because it means a person is considering how guilty they will feel if they do something wrong…

…and this stops them doing it.

This is different from feeling guilt after doing something wrong, which encourages people to try and make up for the transgression.

People who are prone to anticipating guilt, though, feel more responsibility towards others and are much less likely to behave exploitatively.

The results come from a series of six studies in which people played economic games that tested their behaviour.

In these games, people more prone to anticipating guilt were more likely to return money to others.

The authors write:

“Trust and trustworthiness are critical for effective relationships and effective organizations.

Individuals and institutions incur high costs when trust is misplaced, but people can mitigate these costs by engaging in relationships with individuals who are trustworthy.

Our findings extend the substantial literature on trust by deepening our understanding of trustworthiness: When deciding in whom to place trust, trust the guilt-prone.”

Dr Emma Levine, the study’s first author, said:

“Our research suggests that if you want your employees to be worthy of trust, make sure they feel personally responsible for their behavior and that they expect to feel guilty about wrongdoing.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Levine et al., 2018).

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How mental imagery can help you lose weight 8 times faster without dieting or exercise.

Mental imagery can boost weight loss significantly, research finds.

Functional Imagery Training (FIT) enabled people to lose 8 times as much weight as those using an alternate talk therapy.

The technique is designed to help people imagine how good it will feel to lose weight.

The imagery training also helped people lose almost two inches from their waistlines.

Surprisingly, people in the study did no extra exercise, nor did they go on a diet.

The mental imagery was designed simply to increase motivation.

It involves people focusing on how they will look and feel after they lose weight.

Dr Linda Solbrig, who led the study, explained the basics:

“We started with taking people through an exercise about a lemon.

We asked them to imagine seeing it, touching it, juicing it, drinking the juice and juice accidentally squirting in their eye, to emphasise how emotional and tight to our physical sensations imagery is.

From there we are able to encourage them to fully imagine and embrace their own goals.

Not just ‘imagine how good it would be to lose weight’ but, for example, ‘what would losing weight enable you to do that you can’t do now? What would that look / sound / smell like?’, and encourage them to use all of their senses.”

There were 141 people in the study who were either given the FIT training or an alternate technique called Motivational Interviewing.

The results revealed that after six months people in the FIT group lost 9 pounds in contrast to just 1.5 pounds in the comparison group.

One year later, people in the FIT group had lost 13 pounds, compared with only 1.5 pounds in the Motivational Interviewing group.

Dr Solbrig explained:

“Most people agree that in order to lose weight, you need to eat less and exercise more, but in many cases, people simply aren’t motivated enough to heed this advice—however much they might agree with it.

So FIT comes in with the key aim of encouraging someone to come up with their own imagery of what change might look and feel like to them, how it might be achieved and kept up, even when challenges arise.”

The study was published in the International Journal of Obesity (Solbrig et al., 2018).

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