Assessment of vulnerabilities of gifted children

Assessment of vulnerabilities of gifted children

 Introduction 

This paper reviews the nature of mental weakness of the gifted children with regard to the possible cause of the affective disorders and the issues surrounding the methodological difficulties of how to indentify and assess the giftedness and the affective disorders of the gifted children.  Although IQ is being used as a standard tool to identify the gifted, giftedness is better identified based upon the concepts of a sub-culture and objective imaging studies. Adopting the strategy called multicultural assessment procedure and possibly neuro-imaging modalities, as well as taking into consideration the admission policy of specialized schools for the gifted will serve as a basis for more accurate assessment of vulnerabilities of the gifted.

Discussion

Reich, 1981 suggested that there exits vulnerabilities of highly gifted children.  Her opinion which is persuasive stated highly gifted children is vulnerable because of the following reasons:

They show uneven development that corresponds to create a gap between advanced intellectual ability and immature social and physical skills

They have perfectionism that sets unrealistic high standards and goals

They are closely surrounded by adults including teachers and parents who expect them too much and force them to work to an impossible and extraordinary extent

They are intensively sensitive to environmental and social cues

They lose their ways of life due to the presence of too many opportunities to become anybody and to do anything and have difficulties in defining themselves

They have communication problems with their peers

They learn too quickly what has been taught and thus should spend much of their time in classrooms without doing anything.   

 Although the author put a high remark on the awareness, the weakness of the paper is that the definition of the giftedness was not well addressed.  The author used only IQs for the measurement of giftedness, which stated IQs above 145 to be highly gifted.  The way of how to identify giftedness should have been addressed in a more accurate manner. 

Baruch (1978) commented that for the government to tackle the issue of the giftedness, the IQ threshold has been set at 130, which corresponds to 2.28% of the population and the number of the gifted is estimated to be 200,000 in France.  IQ only assesses analytical intelligence.  It was suggested that leadership ability, creative or productive ability and visual and performing arts should be also incorporated for accurate assessment of giftedness. The weakness of the argument is that the methodology is not pragmatic.  It is an interesting comment that a highly active imagination of the gifted and the non-receptive environments on the side of the schools and families would cause anxiety and intellectual inhibition, which eventually may activate defense mechanism of the gifted and cause affective disorders.

The affective disorders are generally diagnosed based upon self-reporting questionnaires. This methodology is not valid for gifted children, as they have defense mechanism stemming from perfectionism and feel shameful to report depressive mood to others (Jackson & Peterson, 2003, 175-186). To the end of accurate diagnosis of affective disorders among the gifted children, direct-interviewing ...