Personality Characteristics of Gifted Children, Gifted Adolescents and Gifted Adults

• An intense drive to explore, understand and master the environment. This drive can feel like a powerful physiological force that is difficult to describe and hard to control or direct.

• Intense motivation to explore “big” ideas and “big problems” in detail and in depth.

• A capacity for learning that is immediate and effortless:

  • Their unusual capacity to combine razor sharp logical and uncanny intuition makes them bored and inpatient with conventional teaching and standard educational settings.

• A capacity for precocious accomplishments in many domains – intellectual, artistic, athletic, musical.

• Extra sensitivities:

  • Physical sensitivities: light, temperature, sound, food, fabric

  • Intense allergic responses.

• Aesthetic sensitivities: color, rhythm, form, space – a sophisticated sense of beauty well in advance of their years.

• A capacity to “tune into” inanimate objects – a special fascination and capacity to bond with the physical environment.

• Emotional sensitivies

  • Empathy for other people’s pain and suffering.

  • Emotional insight into others personality structure, intellect and conflicts.