So I'm designing an alien race loosely based on the Kafers from the tabletop RPG 2300 AD. These aliens not only become temporarily hyper intelligent as an electrochemical effect of their equivalent to the "fight-flight-freeze" response, but also have permanent increases in fluid intelligence over a longer period of time as a result of being in what are perceived to be threatening situations. This later effect can even be accompanied by slight increases in brain size (which their braincase compensates for over time) if it’s extreme enough.
These aliens are initially psychologically similar to humans. If never exposed to stimuli that activates their fight-flight-freeze response, (described above), they generally will maintain an equivalent human fluid intelligence of around 70 IQ, but can theoretically reach a genius-level intellect if they've been having a bad enough time in life. It should also be noted that they don’t necessarily enjoy being in threatening situations any more than humans do. So we would expect a low likelihood of an “addiction to danger” psychological condition within their race.
I’m mostly curious as to the psychological and sociological implications of such an organism, say, if you got an ancestral hunter-gatherer population of this species, and let evolution do its thing for about 200,000 years or so, how will this affect their psychology and social structures, especially when they finally start building permanent settlements and advancing past the stone age.
Edited: Grammar and some extra clarification.