From the Editor’s Desk

Welcome to Volume 43, Issue 3 of the Roeper Review. The scholarly articles in this issue provide insights about the nature of wisdom and how to develop it, motivation and achievement, the dynamics and effects of perfectionism, the efficacious employment of a thinking skills program, and the influence of school settings on well-being.

Robert Sternberg and Sareh Karami vigorously push us toward ethical awareness with their article, A 4W Model of Wisdom and Giftedness in Wisdom. In their analysis they illustrate the intricacies of wisdom while showing why the field needs to escape from some calcified conceptual frameworks in order to align our thoughts and actions with the common good.

In their article, A Look Beyond Aptitude: The Relationship Between Personality Traits, Autonomous Motivation, and Academic Achievement in Gifted Students, Sakhavat Mammadov, Tracy Cross, and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius enable us to appreciate more about the dispositions and actions of those with high levels of intelligence and impressive talents. Their inquiry sheds more light on what needs to be done to enhance the prospects for success of the gifted.

Soohyun Yi and Marcia Gentry provide a helpful explanation of connections between perfectionism and giftedness in their article, Academic Perfectionism of High-Ability and High-Achieving Students in Mathematics and Science: Differential Relations by Identification Criteria of Giftedness. They clear up some misconceptions about the nature and the influence of perfectionism on the thoughts, actions, and long-term development of bright young people. Their findings have implications for counseling and mentorship.

Julia Hujar and Michael Matthews looked into teachers’ insights about the effectiveness of a thinking skills program aimed at talent development. Their article, Teacher Perceptions of the Primary Education Thinking Skills Program, can help us think about the importance of efficient implementation when it comes to practical interventions in school settings.

Susan Burkett-McKee, Bruce Allen Knight, and Michelle Avila Vanderburg explore the effects of contextual influences on the psychological vibrancy of gifted young people in their article, Psychological Well-Being of Students With High Abilities and Their School’s Ecology: Is There a Relationship? Through the analysis they enable us to understand more about the nature of educational influences on emotional dynamics.

Every issue of the Roeper Review also includes interviews with a prominent scholar of giftedness or creativity and a highly accomplished expert in a particular domain. These interviews are designed to clarify the nature of talents, opportunities, and barriers that influence work in various professions while helping us strengthen theory and research in gifted education and in other creative intelligence fields. The outstanding scholar featured in this issue is Bronwyn MacFarlane, a STEM expert and a leader of many local and national educational innovation projects. Her work has done much to push the field forward. The talented expert in this issue is Richard Murray, a highly ethical “nonlinear funding” expert who comes up with amazingly creative ways to brighten the prospects of the deprived.

Finally, I conclude the introduction of each issue with a brief portrayal of insights from a foreign discipline to enable us to think more expansively about giftedness and other forms of creative intelligence. The insight shared here is about the pernicious effects of corruption in the world today.

Widespread corruption

In addition to an array of large-scale, 21st-century problems, corruption exerts considerable influence throughout the world. In fact, it is corruption that causes or substantially contributes to most of the other 21st-century problems. Dan Ariely (psychologist) and Ximena Garcia-Rada (marketing expert) reported the results of various studies investigating the nature, dynamics, and extent of corruption throughout the world (2020). Here are some of the insights they generated:

• Corrupt financial exchanges amount to over 1 trillion USD per year.

• More than 2/3 of 180 countries analyzed scored less than 50 on a scale ranging from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).

• Taken together, large- and small-scale corruption undermines socioeconomic development in nations, especially in those approaching the “highly corrupt” scale in the corruption analyses.

• Developed nations designated as the least corrupt include Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, and Singapore. The United States is farther down the list because it suffers from significant economic and political corruption. Some Third World countries languish in the extremely corrupt range.

Ariely and Garcia-Rada (2020) described how receiving a request for a bribe erodes moral character. They mentioned that “bribery is like a contagious disease: it spreads quickly among individuals, often by mere exposure, and becomes harder to control as time passes” (p. 82). A large part of the problem arises from bribery becoming more acceptable as it becomes widespread throughout a society.

So what are the implications for gifted education? The widespread influence of corruption magnifies the importance of injecting more ethical awareness into theory development, research, teaching, learning, and counseling. There are some initiatives along these lines with scholars promoting wisdom (see Ambrose & Cross, 2009; Sternberg, 2017, 2020; Sternberg et al., in press; Sternberg & Karami, 2021). Over the long run we have to ensure that gifted young people are protected from corruption, to the extent possible, and are inoculated against its distortional effects on their minds.

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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