Over the whole range of IQ, intelligence appears to have a small protective effect against every psychopathological condition considered

Shevchenko, Victoria, Ghislaine Labouret, Franck Ramus, and Hugo Peyre. 2022. “Predictive Capacity of IQ and Its Constituents for Psychopathology: A Study of the EDEN Cohort.” PsyArXiv. March 23. doi:10.31234/osf.io/nrf3y

Abstract: The objective of this study was to provide a more complete description of the potential relations between intelligence and psychopathology, over the entire IQ range. We relied on a longitudinal study named EDEN which provides data for a large cohort of children who were subject to regular follow-ups since birth. Firstly, we tested correlations between IQ indices and psychopathology. Secondly, we performed a correlation analysis between verbal/performance IQ discrepancy and psychopathology. Psychopathology was defined in terms of three conditions: internalizing disorder, conduct disorder and social problems. We hypothesized a presence of a relation between cognitive ability and the aforementioned conditions, but we refrained from putting forward a hypothesis on the sign of this relation given the variability of the existing literature. The results of the present study constitute weak evidence in favour of the alternative hypothesis.