http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/ma...nted=1&_r=1&em
Understanding the Anxious Mind
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: September 29, 2009
This is a long article. Basically, this scientist examined babies and followed them years later.
It turns out that babies who were anxious were also anxious when they grew up and got to college age.
Quote:
But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom.
They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe.
For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.
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Quote:
LOOKING AT THE neurology of anxiety raises the inevitable question of why a trait that causes so much mental anguish would have evolved in the first place.
For the species as a whole, it is most likely an advantage to have some group members who are hypervigilant and who see everything as a threat, always ready to sound an alarm and leap into action.
For the individual, though, being inhibited can mean having fewer mating opportunities, not to mention the psychic burden, wearing yourself ragged with a brain that’s always on high alert.
In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities.
Kagan has observed that the high-reactives in his sample tend to avoid the traditional hazards of adolescence.
Because they are more restrained than their wilder peers, he says, high-reactive kids are less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.
They grow up to be the Felix Ungers of the world, he says, clearing a safe, neat path for the Oscar Madisons.
People with a high-reactive temperament — as long as it doesn’t show itself as a clinical disorder — are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared.
Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends.
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hmmm. . . .
Worriers are most attentive to our friends.
Maybe that is true.
And I think that we are conscientious.
But I do not fit into the category of "well prepared."
How about anyone else?
M.