ABSTRACT
For hundreds of years, the general belief among most people was that highly intelligent individuals were doomed to lives of social isolation, emotional instability, and psychopathology. However, with the Scientific Revolution, “a paradigm of demystification of giftedness emerged, in which scientists and scholars strived to unpack individual differences through systematic investigation and measurement”. Contemporary approaches to studying the social and emotional development of gifted children and adolescents are varied; most research focuses either on factors that might place gifted students uniquely at risk for social and emotional difficulties or on those psychosocial factors that might enhance the development of talent. Researchers and practitioners who explicitly focus on the whole child (meaning the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development) and who believe gifted children are cognitively, socially, and emotionally different from average-ability children have paradigmatic beliefs that align with the gifted child paradigm.
