From the Editor’s Desk

Welcome to Volume 42, Issue 2 of the Roeper Review. The articles in this issue address early college entrance, adult giftedness, the motivational dynamics of elite performers in the arts and athletics, and connections between a theory of intelligence and reading and mathematics proficiency. The issue has an international flavor with authors hailing from Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, Vietnam, and the United States.

Noel Jett and Anne Rinn help us understand the nature and benefits of early college entry in their article, Student Experiences and Outcomes of Early College: A Systematic Review. They illustrate the effects of early college programs on academic achievement, affective development, and the prospects for success in adult life.

While most of the attention in the field is directed toward gifted children, some researchers are shedding light on phenomena pertaining to adult giftedness. For example, Maggie Brown, Elizabeth Peterson, and Catherine Rawlinson help us understand the big picture in this growing niche of the field in their article, Research With Gifted Adults: What International Experts Think Needs to Happen to Move the Field Forward.

Interest in the performing arts and athletics as avenues for talent development also has been increasing in the field. In their article, Thriving, Striving, or Just Surviving? TD Learning Conditions, Motivational Processes and Well-Being Among Norwegian Elite Performers in Music, Ballet, and Sport, Heidi Haraldsen, Sanna Nordin-Bates, Frank Eirik Abrahamsen, and Hallgeir Halvari portray the complicated motivational dynamics experienced by high achievers in these areas.

Conceptions of intelligence have captured the attention of many of us for decades. In their article, The Relationship of Cognitive Processes With Reading and Mathematics Achievement in Intellectually Gifted Children, Kristy Dunn, George Georgiou, and J. P. Das portray the results of research they carried out to determine the extent to which a prominent theory of intelligence predicts reading and mathematics proficiency in the gifted.

Each issue of the Roeper Review also features interviews with impressive, accomplished individuals including a leading scholar and an expert in a particular domain. The prominent scholar in this issue is Marcia Gentry. She has carried out innovative studies of pedagogy, cluster grouping and differentiation, and the needs of underserved populations, among other topics in the field. Her insights can go a long way toward improving the practical aspects of our work. The domain-specific expert featured in this issue is Armando Mejorado, an exceptionally creative artist-restaurateur who actually goes far beyond domain-specificity to make multiple domains of human activity come together in his work. He combines innovative, entrepreneurial restaurant leadership with intriguing artwork, interior design, photography, teaching, and much more. In the interview, he describes the complex cognitive, motivational, and affective processes involved in synthesizing these diverse creative domains.

Finally, our book review section, edited by Sakhavat Mammadov, includes an analysis of a book that provides interesting portrayals of the ways in which gifted young people make decisions about the career paths they will pursue. Hong Cao authored, Clarifying Career Decisions of the Gifted, a review of the book, The Career Decisions of Gifted Students and Other High Ability Groups, which was written by Jae Yup Jung.

Improving the world by appreciating patterns in long-term human evolution?

Social epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett (2019) carried out an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis on the effects of persistent socioeconomic inequality in today’s world. This was a follow-up to some of their earlier work on the topic (Cabieses, Pickett, & Wilkinson, 2015a, 2015b; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). In part of the analysis they borrowed from leading anthropologists to describe a review of over 100 anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies from around the world. These studies showed how remarkably egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have been throughout prehistory all the way up to modern times: “There is no dominance hierarchy among hunter-gatherers … rank is simply not discernible … This is a cross-cultural universal” (Erdal & Whiten, cited in Wilkinson & Pickett, 2019, p. 130).

Wilkinson and Pickett synthesized these insights with discoveries in other fields, including their own, to show how the dominance hierarchies that tend to prevail in animal groups such as monkeys and apes have waxed and waned throughout the course of human evolution. The cooperative nature of hunter-gatherer groups encouraged populations to remain remarkably egalitarian. But when much of humanity shifted toward agrarian forms of “civilization” food acquisition and production became more individualized and the basis for egalitarianism disintegrated. Land owning inspired people to become more individualistic and selfish, and hierarchical societies emerged, with a few extremely powerful individuals at the top and the vast majority at the bottom with few rights and resources.

Wilkinson and Pickett (2019) went on to point out that modern societies tend to retain this hierarchical pattern, even making it worse in recent decades, while paradoxically, “the complexity of modern industrial production has, however, returned us to an inherently interdependent, and so potentially cooperative, way of life” (p. 233). In essence, they point out how our extremely unequal societal structures could again become far more egalitarian because current economic patterns make it possible and preferable. Meanwhile, Wilkinson and Pickett also show how pernicious severe inequality is because it generates chronic stress that makes societal problems far more severe. These problems include drug and alcohol abuse, violence, the disintegration of trust, and the lack of social mobility, among others.

The implications for gifted education are profound. Even the wealthy in highly unequal societies suffer from the chronic stress that comes from comparisons with those more fortunate. And gifted young people in the middle and at the bottom of unequal societies suffer far more. The gifted who are born into the lower levels of societies that block social mobility are trapped in those levels while some dull-witted, lazy individuals born into the higher levels retain their lofty status and are perceived as brilliant. Meanwhile, we need the gifted, those who work with them, and the policymakers who craft societal rules to think in more broad-scope, long-term ways so they can perceive the big-picture patterns and societal evolution that Wilkinson and Pickett illustrate. If they can do this, they might push their societies toward more egalitarian structures so they can reduce the chronic stress severe inequality generates, and create a better world.

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Thanks to the reviewers who refine and strengthen the literature in our field and to the insightful researchers and theorists who publish their work in our journal. If you plan to contribute an article to the Roeper Review, see our author guidelines on our website: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uror20