The skill has a particularly strong link to higher nonverbal IQ.
People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.
People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.
Being open to new experiences and more extraverted are both linked to higher intelligence, research finds.
People who are open to experience tend to have a more active imagination, higher sensitivity to beauty and more intellectual curiosity, among other things.
Open people tend to retain general information better and they are also better at storing memories in the short term.
The results come from a survey of 381 people aged 19- to 89-years-old.
They were split into different groups depending on their cognitive performance.
The type of intelligence measured in the study is known as ‘crystallised’.
This refers to the ability to use learned information and is often tested through general knowledge and vocabulary.
In a twist to the findings, though, it turned out that some adults over 60 performed as well as younger people.
Among these people, it was being disagreeable that was linked to higher IQ.
Other research has also found that people who are highly intelligent tend to be independent and aloof.
The study’s authors conclude:
“The results also suggests that there are differences in personality–intelligence relationships between those who retain a normal level of overall cognitive ability in old age and those older adults who are cognitively superior.”
The study was published in the journal Personality and individual Differences (Baker & Bichsel, 2006).
How your sense of humour, what time you go to bed and your curiosity reveal your intelligence.
How your sense of humour, what time you go to bed and your curiosity reveal your intelligence.
Being curious, staying up late and having a dark sense of humour are all signs of a high IQ, psychological research finds.
People who are curious ask lots of questions, look for surprises, seek out sensations and make time to search out new ideas, a study finds.
Intelligence, along with curiosity and some personality factors, predicts successful performance in many areas.
Being a night owl, meanwhile, is linked to stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.
Night owls prefer to stay up late at night and rise later in the morning.
Around one-third of the population are night owls, with one-quarter preferring to rise early.
The remainder fall somewhere in between, being neither early risers nor late sleepers.
Liking dark humour is a sign of higher intelligence, research finds.
Dark humour, the study’s authors write, is:
“…a kind of humour that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms.
Black humour, often called grotesque, morbid, gallows or sick humour, is used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and cruelty of the modern world.
Characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony, potentially requiring increased cognitive efforts to get the joke.”
Surprisingly, though, people who like dark humour feel the least aggressive towards others.
In other words, it is not aggressive people who like sick jokes.
Dark humour, it seems, is more difficult to enjoy without higher intelligence.
The study was published in the journals Perspectives on Psychological Science, Personality and Individual Differences & Cognitive Processing (Díaz-Morales & Escribano, 2013; von Stumm et al., 2011; Willinger et al., 2017).
The common drink is linked to a higher level of education.
The common drink is linked to a higher level of education.
Smarter people are more likely to drink alcohol daily, research finds.
Better educated people are also more likely to have a drinking problem.
Higher grades in school at the age of just 5-years-old predict greater intake of alcohol many decades later.
Among women, there is an especially strong link between alcohol consumption and being highly educated.
The reason may be that middle-class lifestyles — accessible through education — are linked to more alcohol consumption.
It could also be because intelligent people often value novel things and are at a greater risk of getting bored.
The study’s authors write:
“The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns
The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”
The results come from a study that followed everyone born in the UK in one week in 1970.
Women with degrees were 86% more likely to drink on most days than those with less education, the study found.
Highly-educated women were 1.7 times more likely to have a drinking problem than the less well-educated.
The authors write:
“Both males and females who achieved high-level performance in test scores administered at ages five and 10 are significantly more likely to abuse alcohol than individuals who performed poorly on those tests.”
The link between alcohol consumption and education could come down to a range of factors, the authors write:
“Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated.”
The study was published in the journal Social Science and Medicine (Huerta & Borgonovi, 2010).
Along with intelligence, certain parenting strategies are linked to less aggression, disobedience and restlessness.
Along with intelligence, certain parenting strategies are linked to less aggression, disobedience and restlessness.
Children whose parents are ‘chatterboxes’ tend to have higher IQs.
Children hearing more speech from their caregivers had better reasoning and numeracy skills, the observational study found.
Some children in the study heard twice as many words as others.
Perhaps less surprisingly, children who heard higher quality speech from their parents, using a more diverse vocabulary, knew more words themselves.
For the study, tiny audio recorders were fitted to 107 children aged between 2 and 4.
They were recorded for 16 hours a day for three days at home.
Ms Katrina d’Apice, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“Using the audio recorders allowed us to study real-life interactions between young children and their families in an unobtrusive way within the home environment rather than a lab setting.
We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children hear is positively associated with their cognitive ability.
However, further research is needed to explore the reasons behind this link — it could be that greater exposure to language provides more learning opportunities for children, but it could also be the case that more intelligent children evoke more words from adults in their environment.”
While parental talk was linked to children’s cognitive abilities, their parenting strategy was linked to their behaviour.
Specifically, positive parenting was linked to less aggression, disobedience and restlessness.
Positive parenting involves responding to children in positive ways and encouraging them to explore the world.
Professor Sophie von Stumm, study co-author, said:
“This study is the largest naturalistic observation of early life home environments to date.
We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children were exposed to varied greatly within families.
Some kids heard twice as many words on one day as they did on the next.
The study highlights the importance of treating early life experiences as dynamic and changeable rather than static entities — approaching research in this way will help us to understand the interplay between environmental experiences and children’s differences in development.”
The study was published in the journal Developmental Psychology (d’Apice et al., 2019).
The personality trait that is linked to higher intelligence.
The personality trait that is linked to higher intelligence.
Being cooperative is a sign of high intelligence, recent research finds.
More intelligent people tend to be cautious with their trust at first, then build it up with experience.
People who are cooperative tend to be more helpful, believe in teamwork and be mutually supportive.
In addition, those who are cooperative tend to be better at seeing the big picture and learning from experience.
Higher intelligence allows people to process information more quickly.
All these factors are signs that someone’s IQ is high.
Professor Eugenio Proto, who led the study, said:
“People might naturally presume that people who are nice, conscientious and generous are automatically more cooperative.
But, through our research, we find overwhelming support for the idea that intelligence is the primary condition for a socially cohesive, cooperative society.
A good heart and good behaviour have an effect too but it’s transitory and small.
An additional benefit of higher intelligence in our experiment, and likely in real life, is the ability to process information faster, hence to accumulate more extensive experience, and to learn from it.
This scenario can be applied to the workplace, where it’s likely that intelligent people who see the bigger picture and work cooperatively, will ultimately be promoted and financially rewarded.”
The conclusions come from people playing a series of games that tested cooperation.
Each involved trading off risk against reward.
The results showed that people who were more agreeable and conscientious were also more cooperative.
However, the influence of these personality traits was dwarfed by that of IQ.
Those with lower IQs, the study found, tend not to use a consistent strategy and disregard the consequences of their actions.
The study’s authors explain:
“Higher intelligence resulted in significantly higher levels of cooperation and earnings.
The failure of individuals with lower intelligence to appropriately estimate the future consequences of current actions accounts for these difference in outcomes.
Personality also affects behavior, but in smaller measure, and with low persistence.”
The study was published in the Journal of Political Economy (Proto et al., 2018).
The foods can even restore memory in older people.
The foods can even restore memory in older people.
Flavanols, which naturally occur in fruit and vegetables, can make you smarter, new research finds.
People who consumed a cocoa drink laced with flavanols performed 11 percent faster on complex cognitive tests than those given a placebo.
Flavanols work by increasing blood oxygenation.
Flavanols are present in grapes, cocoa, apples, berries, tea and many other foods.
Dark chocolate is a particularly rich source of cocoa flavanols.
Dr Catarina Rendeiro, study co-author, said:
“Flavanols are small molecules found in many fruits and vegetables, and cocoa, too.
They give fruits and vegetables their bright colors, and they are known to benefit vascular function.
We wanted to know whether flavanols also benefit the brain vasculature, and whether that could have a positive impact on cognitive function.”
The small study included 18 people given either a flavanol-rich drink or a placebo.
Two hours later, brain scans showed that those who had consumed flavanols had blood oxygenation three times higher in response to hypercapnia.
Hypercapnia means the elevation of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.
Dr Rendeiro explained the results:
“Our results showed a clear benefit for the participants taking the flavanol-enriched drink – but only when the task became sufficiently complicated.
We can link this with our results on improved blood oxygenation – if you’re being challenged more, your brain needs improved blood oxygen levels to manage that challenge.
It also further suggests that flavanols might be particularly beneficial during cognitively demanding tasks.”
Taking cocoa flavanols over the long term has also been linked to a variety of mental benefits.
In elderly people, they have been shown to improve cognitive performance, attention, processing speed and verbal fluency.
These effects are particularly strong among elderly people starting to see age-related mental decline.
One study, published in Nature Neuroscience, found a high-flavanol diet could restore aspects of older people’s memory back to that of a typical 30- or 40-year-old.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Gratton et al., 2020).
This bright quality is linked to higher intelligence.
This bright quality is linked to higher intelligence.
Feeling more happiness is a sign of a higher IQ, research finds.
Indeed, stable happiness is also a sign of higher IQ.
More intelligent people experience fewer drops in their happiness over the years.
People with higher IQs are just as happy at 31-years-old as they are at 51.
In contrast, the happiness of people with lower IQs is not just lower overall, but also goes up and down more over the years.
The conclusions come from a national survey of all 17,419 babies born in Britain during one week in 1958.
Those that stayed in the study were asked about their levels of happiness from ages 31 to 51.
The results are explained by Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, the study’s author:
“…childhood general intelligence emerged as the strongest predictor of the life-course variability of happiness.
More intelligent children on average tended to grow up to be more stable in their subjective well-being throughout adulthood.”
However, the reason that more intelligent people enjoy stable happiness was not clear from the study.
Dr Kanazawa writes:
“More intelligent individuals were significantly more stable in their happiness, and it was not entirely because: (1) they were more educated and wealthier (even though they were); (2) they were healthier (even though they were); (3) they were more stable in their marital status (even though they were); (4) they were happier (even though they were)…”
Higher satisfaction with life is also a sign of high intelligence, a previous study has found.
People who are more satisfied with their life and their job score higher on tests of general mental ability.
Satisfaction with life is one of the two major aspects of happiness, along with the feeling of positive emotions in the moment.
The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology (Kanazawa et al., 2014).
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.
Having larger pupils is linked to higher fluid intelligence, a study finds.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.
It is contrasted with crystallised intelligence, which involves using skills, knowledge and experience.
The differences are visible to the unaided eye, despite the relatively small size of the pupils.
The pupils are the black part in the centre of the eye.
They open and close in response to the amount of light falling on them.
The pupils also respond to how much work the brain is doing and other psychological factors.
The study’s authors explain:
“Starting in the 1960s it became apparent to psychologists that the size of the pupil is related to more than just the amount of light entering the eyes.
Pupil size also reflects internal mental processes.
For instance, in a simple memory span task, pupil size precisely tracks changes in memory load, dilating with each new item held in memory and constricting as each item is subsequently recalled.”
Dilated pupils have been shown to reflect when a person’s brain is overloaded with information, how interested a person is in what is being said to them, whether they are in pain and much more.
For the study, 40 people’s baseline pupil size was measured — half were in the top quartile for intelligence, the other half in the bottom quartile.
Baseline pupil size is measured when a person is sitting down, not doing too much.
The authors describe the results:
“…we have shown that large differences in baseline pupil size, even observable to the unaided eye, exist between high and low cognitive ability individuals engaged in a cognitively demanding task and cannot be explained by differences in mental effort.”
The study was published in the journal Cognitive Psychology (Tsukahara et al., 2016).
This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.
This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.
Highly intelligent people are more likely to be generous and altruistic, psychological research finds.
Altruistic people are unselfish and sometimes deny themselves so that others can have more.
Intelligent people may be more generous partly because they can afford it.
People with higher IQs generally have greater resources, or can expect to recover what they have given later on.
Generosity is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but this study clearly shows a link.
The study’s authors write:
“In the first study, we found that those who contributed more than their fair share to a public good were more intelligent, as measured by two relatively independent measures of general intelligence.
In the second study, we showed that those who possess a dispositional tendency to value joint benefits more than
their own, scored higher on an intelligence test.”
For the study, 301 people played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves.
The results revealed that intelligent people were more generous to others.
People who were more egotistical — keeping more for themselves — tended to be less intelligent.
People with higher IQs were more concerned with the public good.
The authors write:
“The evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’.
Consistent with the finding that children’s intelligence
predicts later socio-economic success better than parents’ attributes, we assume that intelligence is an indicator of future resources.As a consequence, someone with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills.”
In other words, intelligent people can afford to be more generous because they have more to give.
The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Millet & Dewitte, 2007).
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