Intellectual giftedness and social success: an analysis of the contradictory context

Abstract

The article addressed the problem of the links between the intellectual giftedness (General Intelligence), on the one hand, and social development, on the other. Analysis of experimental data gives a very contradictory picture. While some studies indicate a certain integrity of mental and social development of a gifted child and his/her well-being in social terms, the other part of researchers numerates facts of significant difficulties for gifted children and adults in situations of social contacts. The article discusses the reasons for such conflicts, and the main one is the existence of two different variants (types) of age-related development of intellectually gifted children. If in one case we observe "over full-fledged" children with a very harmonious type of development (from the point of view of social skills) in another case we confront with problematic children, who display a distinct asynchrony of development, manifesting the dramatic lag of their emotional and social development from mental one