Live data from Hacker News

The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

1–10 of 48 posts

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#3

Ugh, they went out of their way to create a mobile interface which breaks vertical scrolling (you have to hit the "next" button to see the next (non-scrollable) page. Guys, seriously, stop breaking the mobile web by "improving" it :(

I got downvoted for calling that out on one of their last articles. Side scrolling is absolutely non-intuitive and painfully limits ones ability to easily read an article on mobile. /ot

The article is interesting though in that it calls out with medical evidence a correlation I think of as relatively obvious. I've met some seriously smart people in the world with personality peculiarities that seem to stem from anxiety.

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#4

Ugh, they went out of their way to create a mobile interface which breaks vertical scrolling (you have to hit the "next" button to see the next (non-scrollable) page. Guys, seriously, stop breaking the mobile web by "improving" it :(

While the paginated mobile version is terrible, if you poke around they have PDF, "desktop" classic style and others. PDF and the classic view are actually not bad at all. Their mobile is an abomination just like the rest of the "mobile" web but these alternatives on that link.. I'll give them credit.

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#5
"We have demonstrated in a previous study that a high degree of worry in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) correlates positively with intelligence and that a low degree of worry in healthy subjects correlates positively with intelligence."

Woot! As a happy person who doesn't worrry much I was pleasantly surprised to find out I'm not necessarily and idiot.

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#6
The data behind this study is shoddy at best. Missing patients, sample size of 30 reduced due to environmental factors. As well as assuming IQ is an accurate measurement of intelligence.

Would be interesting to look at education data against the same person's mental health data on a massive scale. Wouldn't happen unless people opted in to sharing.

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#7
post #5

"We have demonstrated in a previous study that a high degree of worry in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) correlates positively with intelligence and that a low degree of worry in healthy subjects correlates positively with intelligence." Woot! As a happy person who doesn't worrry much I was pleasantly surprised to find out I'm not necessarily and idiot.

So if I'm having high levels of anxiety and feel dumber every day, it means I'm not having a generalized anxiety disorder?

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#9
I have only read the text diagonally while looking for some keywords, but my 2 cents: in many cases, when a neuroscience study claims to be able to "predict" something, they mean "var X and var Y show a strong correlation". Actual predictive power is not checked unless there is a real test set that is left out of the training phase and all that (cross-validation, etc).

When this article claims:

> When data from GAD patients and healthy controls were combined, relatively low CHO predicted both relatively higher IQ and worry scores.

... it is actually saying that CHO is inversely correlated with higher IQ and worry scores.

(Unless, again, as noted above, they are cross-validating in a way that was not obvious to me when I checked for it.)

Re: The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety

#10
post #5

"We have demonstrated in a previous study that a high degree of worry in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) correlates positively with intelligence and that a low degree of worry in healthy subjects correlates positively with intelligence." Woot! As a happy person who doesn't worrry much I was pleasantly surprised to find out I'm not necessarily and idiot.

From the first sentence of the conclusion:

> It should be noted, however, that... the mean IQ for the GAD group was elevated in comparison to the control group (a mean of ∼119 versus a mean of ∼109). Further, the IQ means for both the GAD group and the control group were significantly higher than the average IQ of the general population (∼100). Results should thus be interpreted with the consideration that the study sample is non-representative of the general population.

Post reply on HN