A new study from sports psychologist James Bell suggests that neurotic people are more likely to make more accurate judgments the faster they respond:
One hundred and ninety-six teenage male cricketers, all members of regional academies, took part in the study. They watched six clips of footage recorded from behind bowlers during the Twenty20 World Cup in England in 2009. Just as the bowler released the ball, each clip was frozen and remained visible for half a second – the approximate amount of time that a batsman has to decide how to react to a delivery. After the freeze-frame disappeared, the participants pressed one of two keyboard keys as fast as possible to indicate whether they judged it was better to attempt to hit a single run, or to go for a “six” (a boundary shot similar to a home run in baseball). Four qualified cricket coaches agreed on the optimum response for each clip. The participants also completed a neuroticism scale, measured by their agreement with statements like “I worry about things” and “I get stressed out easily.”
The key finding is that for low scorers on neuroticism, the more quickly they responded on average, the poorer their judgments tended to be, yet for high scorers on neuroticism the opposite was true. “The most parsimonious explanation,” the researchers said, “… is that individuals with high levels of neuroticism tend to have a stimulus-driven attentional orientation, which means they are likely to react automatically to environmental stimuli (particularly if it is threat related) resulting in faster and more accurate responses in the context of the current task.”
The Dish 