(HealthDay News) -- Stanford researchers report that worrying about something before it happens might do more than just create knots in your stomach.

They found that people who seemed to have higher levels of "anticipatory worry" -- judged by brain scans of activity in a part of the brain known as the anterior insula -- did better in a financial game, said study author Gregory Samanez-Larkin, a psychology graduate student at Stanford.

If the anterior insula was more active, the subjects had "a higher fidelity when it comes to making economic decisions," said Samanez-Larkin. "They were better at predicting what might happen." These volunteers learned to avoid losses when playing the same game months later, he noted.

"I wouldn't call it intelligence," he said. Instead, "it's a sort of expertise."