ABSTRACT
Giftedness can complicate the young teenager in their typical search for their true self within a period of increasing complexity. The difficulty in building a social network often appears in early years of primary school, but it becomes an important risk factor in adolescence. An important psychological aspect is introversion, characteristic trait of personality, with which the adolescent is led to close themselves in their inner world out of shyness and could be rather wary or hostile in human contacts and social relationships. A model proposed by Chapman and collaborators focuses on the idea that self-injurious gestures are reiterated to try to extinguish unwanted “psychological states”, typical of gifted teenagers. When gifted child does not have mental-age peers, they may feel socially isolated or experience bullying and exclusion. Connoting them positively means “going beyond the manifested”; adult must try to understand the reasons behind a dysfunctional behavior, so as to be able to help the adolescent with the real difficulty.
