Zack W. Handley’s, Coffee’s For Closers!

Cranky? It may benefit you in long run

By Joe Burris

The Baltimore Sun

Are you a
forty-something grouch who’s first to shout invectives in a slow-moving
checkout lane? A youngster who mocks your dad’s counsel? A graduate
student known for driving your professor crazy with sardonic verbiage?

Take hope: Today, you might be dismissed as a smart-aleck. In your old age, you might be viewed as smarter than average.

Or at least that’s what Jacqueline Bichsel suggests.

Bichsel, a psychology professor at Morgan State in Baltimore,
recently co-authored a study that invites the conclusion that upon
reaching 60, disagreeable people maintain a higher level of
intelligence than more easy-going seniors.

“These individuals have a higher vocabulary,” she said. “They have a better use of words, a better knowledge of facts.”

It also suggests that those dismissed as grumpy old men and women
are often smarter in some ways than the young. The study’s findings fly
in the face of notions that intellect and memory fade with age, and
that has made it a hot topic in the psychology world.