People's brains vary. Research has shown that some people are born with a neurological make-up that can cause them to be more emotionally or intellectually intense, sensitive, and open to external stimuli than the general population. Gifted people belong to this category, though their reality is often not recognized.
Most parents of gifted children won't be surprised that research supports what they can see for themselves: gifted children are highly sensitive to their environment and react with heightened emotional and behavioral responses, more so than do children of average intelligence.
"As many as one-third of gifted children may exhibit sensory processing disorder features, significantly impacting quality of life."
If your mind is a high spec processor, you probably learned to do with fewer filters on your sensory data that your average person. You can handle more sense data, so you sense more than average: you're sensitive. You process more, and more quickly, so you're able to sense more.
Gifted children are as sensitive as they are smart. Their feelings are intense. Social-emotional development will mirror intellectual development. So a gifted child with an IQ in the 98-plus percentile will be very sensitive to other people.
Giftedness has an emotional as well as intellectual component. Intellectual complexity goes hand in hand with emotional depth. Just as gifted children's thinking is more complex and has more depth than other children's, so too are their emotions more complex and more intense.
They have a great deal of emotional intelligence, which means they are skilled at understanding, managing, and expressing emotions. Open-minded: High IQ people are willing to approach problems with an open mind.
Then they had to take an intelligence test. There was no relationship found between the participants' temper and their actual intelligence levels. So you could, in fact, be a smart angry person. However, those with a high temper were found, overall, to overestimate how intelligent they actually were.
HSPs are typically highly intelligent, and seek out opportunities to do deep work.
While giftedness and autism are two types of neurodivergent groups that are often confused, a child can absolutely be gifted and on the autism spectrum.
It is important to emphasize that not all gifted or highly gifted individuals have overexcitabilities. However we do find more people with OEs in the gifted population than in the average population. OVEREXCITABILITIES Overexcitabilities are inborn intensities indicating a heightened ability to respond to stimuli.
Gifted people have the intellectual ability to perform at higher levels than other people of the same age, grade, experience, etc. People with extraordinary intellectual abilities, or exceptionally gifted people, make up approximately 5% of the population, so they are rare.
Giftedness is averaged to make up well less than 5% of the general population, and within that small number, there are subclassifications: mild, moderate, high, exceptional and profound giftedness. The latter three types make up only a very small portion of that less than 5%.
While gifted children may not be any more susceptible to mental health issues as other adolescents, there are certain aspects of giftedness that may influence or amplify a gifted child's experience of mental health issues.
Intelligence can sometimes lead to people being intimidating. This can make people uncomfortable and make them think of you as an arrogant person, even if you are not.
Emotionally intelligent people apologize for their mistakes.
Being emotionally intelligent means that you are able to recognize when you've hurt someone else and then offer up a sincere 4-step apology. And not only do you apologize, but you actually follow through with making effort to change your behavior.
The ENFJ. Emotionally intelligent ENFJs have a powerful ability to recognize and empathize with a wide variety of emotional experiences.
Their analysis found “significant genetic overlap between general cognitive function, reaction time, and many health variables including eyesight, hypertension, and longevity”. Specifically, people who were more intelligent were almost 30% more likely to have genes which might indicate they'd need to wear glasses.
Even though the gifted are no more susceptible to mental illness than anyone else, some gifted children and teens struggle with overthinking, worry, or cautious alertness. Their nervous system seems wired for heightened reactivity. For some, obsessive thinking transitions into anxiety.
Not every child displays intensity in all five, but it is understandable that gifted children who tend to have vivid imaginations, overanalyze, or over-empathize may be more likely to experience anxiety. In particular, OEs that lend themselves to catastrophic thinking may increase a child's risk of anxiety disorder.
External Pressures
High demands from otherwise well-meaning adults can serve as a great source of anxiety. Gifted children often wonder if they can keep up and what else will be expected of them. Those are the big four stress factors for gifted kids. Perfectionism, social problems, sensitivity, and outside pressures.