ABSTRACT
Positive psychology, the study of optimal human functioning, is an attempt to respond to the systematic bias inherent in psychology’s historical emphasis on mental illness rather than on mental wellness. Viewed as a subset of positive psychology, hope theory has been studied at least as often as flow and learned optimism. The way in which gifted individuals adjust to the manner in which significant others, as well as how the larger world, view giftedness has an impact on psychosocial development. Using the foundation of research in positive psychology, hope, and flow, then examining their interactions with psychosocial research relating to giftedness, talent, and talent development, a stage process has been proposed above in the Bull’s Eye Model for Affective Development. Neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of cognition that are most heavily courted in schools—learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning—are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion.
