Predicting psychiatric symptoms by personality types for gifted students

ABSTRACT

This study examined if personality types of gifted students predicted their psychiatric symptoms and if the type of giftedness and gender moderated the relationship between the personality and psychiatric manifestations. The Murphy-Meisgeir Type Indicator for Children and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent were used to measure the personality types and psychiatric symptoms of 232 gifted middle-school students in South Korea. Results found that introversion predicted all of the symptoms but hypomania. Intuition predicted the symptoms of psychopathic deviance and schizophrenia and feeling predicted those of depression and conversion hysteria. Other predictive relationships were found between perceiving and hypomania and between judging and depression and social introversion. Creatively gifted students with introverted and intuitive personality types exhibited several symptoms than were academically gifted students of the same personality. Regarding gender, introverted males were more vulnerable to psychiatric symptoms compared to introverted females, and perceptive females had a higher chance to show hypomania than perceptive males. This study supported that personality characteristics partly accounted for the indications of psychological distress among gifted students. Further studies need to examine causal relationships between the two and to corroborate the current results involving adolescents.

KEYWORDS:

• Gifted students
• academic giftedness
• creative giftedness
• personality types
• psychiatric symptoms
• creativity

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Hyesung Park and Yoonji Kim for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The last two groups (both academically and creatively gifted, and neither academically nor creatively gifted) of students (n = 54) were not included for analysis of the moderating effect of the type of giftedness (academic versus creative).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Global Research Network program through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2016S1A2A2912130].