Big Five Personality Traits and the Social and Emotional Needs of Gifted Students

Erin Morris Miller, PhD

(This blog post was originally published on the discontinued site: thegiftedscholar.com)

Consideration of the social and emotional needs of gifted students has been a part of gifted education from the beginning of the field as a formal area of study. The work of Annemarie Roeper and Leta Stetter Hollingworth informed early efforts, but the developing domains of public education and psychology also influence our understanding. There are essentially two different perspectives you can take when working to understand the social and emotional needs of gifted students. One perspective is to look for overarching characteristics that are particular to gifted students that differentiate them from other students. Statements such as: “gifted children are more sensitive, gifted children are more vulnerable to anxiety, and gifted children struggle to make friends,” come from this perspective, as do statements about gifted students that are more positive, such as: “gifted children will get by on their own, gifted students are highly motivated, and gifted students are more resilient” as compared to others.

Stock Photo of Children at a Museum with Dinosaur Exhibit

Another approach is the perspective that gifted students have the same social emotional needs, ranges of personality, and differences in psychological health as is observed in humans in general. From this perspective, the goal is not to find differences that are specific to gifted students, but rather to examine how cognitive and creative ability interacts with the normal range of human variation in social, emotional, and other psychological traits. It is a complex and nuanced take on issues of the social and emotional health of gifted students. For example, regarding anxiety, the perspective would be: Approximately 18% of people in the US report clinical anxiety disorders, so we expect 18% of gifted individuals to have clinical anxiety. Does cognitive ability affect how they experience that anxiety? Several factors can make anxiety worse in all people. Do these factors happen more often with gifted individuals? This perspective deals mostly in questions and hypotheses because the sum of the research on the social, emotional, and personality characteristics of gifted students is currently inconclusive.

However, working from this perspective (gifted students are more similar than different from others in social/emotional needs and personality) you can pull from the vast amount of more conclusive research about the psychological characteristics of people in general. For example, the five-factor model of personality is one of the more well-known theories. The five-factor model or Big Five is grounded in previous work in personality and has a robust research base supporting its reliability and validity.  The idea is that there are five essential dimensions of personality and people fall somewhere along a continuum of high to low on each of the dimensions of: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Extraversion and Openness to Experience. Most people are not at the ends but fall somewhere between the extremes.

Graphic of the Big Five Personality Traits

Conscientiousness encompasses levels of impulse control, goal directed behaviors, perseverance, organization, and concern for how a behavior affects others. One finding that is relevant for gifted students is that higher conscientiousness is associated with higher self-directed perfectionism. Gifted students who are higher than average in conscientiousness may be more likely to show this type of perfectionism. Lower conscientiousness is associated with lower achievement in school. So gifted students who are lower in conscientiousness are likely those who may be underachieving. Because conscientiousness can vary independently from cognitive ability, it is understandable that some gifted children are highly focused on traditional markers of achievement and others are not.

Agreeableness is about cooperation and prosocial behaviors. It includes the cluster of characteristics associated with trust, kindness, altruism, and warmth. Individuals who are lower in agreeableness tend to be more competitive. The gifted child who is high in agreeableness may be that child who is highly interested in changing the world through altruistic projects. For example, children like Zuriel Oduwole, a teen filmmaker focusing on education development in Africa. If you work long enough with parents and teachers, you will also hear stories about gifted children who are low in agreeableness. It is this child that may challenge teachers and parents by being argumentative. Argumentativeness, combined with a large range of knowledge, leads to a challenging situation.

Extraversion is a measure of sociability. Individuals who are higher in extraversion are talkative and expressive in social situations. They tend to enjoy being with others and participating in group activities. Those who are low in extraversion are more detached from others. (The popular idea of low extraversion equaling introversion, with introversion indicating that one gains energy from introspection, is not consistent with the Big Five. Introspection is part of Openness in this theory.) Gifted students can fall anywhere on the range of extraversion with greater extraversion leading to greater ease in a traditional public schooling situation, which often involves a great deal of social interaction and group activities.

Neuroticism is related to emotional stability and reaction to stress. Individuals who are high in this trait tend to be sad, anxious, irritable and are more unstable in their emotions. Individuals who are lower are more stable and resilient. Currently, it seems as if gifted students can fall anywhere on this continuum, but there are mixed results. Gifted students who are higher in neuroticism are likely to struggle, as are all individuals who are higher in this trait.

Openness involves imaginativeness, insight, broad-mindedness, and curiosity. Individuals who are high in openness like to learn new things and seek new experiences. The Openness trait also includes a factor that deals with a preference for intellectual stimulation. It is here that there is a small to moderate difference between identified gifted students and the general norm. Cognitive ability and openness are positively correlated and in the few studies with gifted children, there is also a small to moderate tendency for these students to be higher in Openness. This means that not every identified student is relatively higher, but gifted individuals do tend to be more imaginative, insightful, broadminded and curious.

Cognitive ability interacts with personality and all factors interact with the environment. Understanding any one person requires a complex consideration of many different factors, however it is not difficult to see how different “types” of gifted students may have characteristic patterns of Big Five factors. Higher Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness, with low Neuroticism, leads to a high academic achiever. Lower Conscientiousness and Neuroticism with higher Agreeableness, Extraversion and Openness would be the happy go lucky underachiever. Higher Neuroticism and Openness with low Extraversion would be the solitary deep thinker who might struggle to get along in groups. It is likely that one could imagine a gifted student who fits into any possible pattern. This is the main point of the perspective that gifted students are more similar than different from others in their social and emotional needs. They are diverse, just like the world in which they live.

Selected References

Bédard, M.-A. & Le Corff, Y. (2019, November 26). Intelligence and personality: A replication and extension study of the association between intelligence and personality aspects. Journal of Individual Differences. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/16140001/a000311

Costa, P.T. & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.

Neihart, M., Pfeiffer, S., & Cross, T. (2015). The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know (2nd ed.). Prufrock Press.

Plucker, J. A, & Callahan, C. M. (Eds.). (2008). Critical issues and practices in gifted education: What the research says. Prufrock Press.

Stoeber, J., Otto, K., & Dalbert, C. (2009). Perfectionism and the Big Five: Conscientiousness predicts longitudinal increases in self-oriented perfectionism. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 363 –368. https://doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.04.004

Wirthwein, L., Bergold, S., Preckel, F., & Steinmayr, R. (2019). Personality and school functioning of intellectually gifted and nongifted adolescents: Self-perceptions and parents' assessments. Learning and Individual Differences, 73, 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2019.04.003

Zeidner, M. & Shani-Zinovich, I. (2011). Do academically gifted and nongifted students differ on the Big-Five and adaptive status? Some recent data and conclusions. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(5), 566 – 570. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.05.007