A High Performance MMPI Scale for Adolescents

Psychosocial development in intellectually gifted children.

“…For example, intellectually gifted children tend to prefer older friends (Terman, 1925;Janos, Robinson, & Marwood, 1984), but the widely used Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1983) lists the item, "prefers playing with older children," as a behavior problem. Other examples are Smith's (1963, 1964) and Kennedy and Smith's (1962) reminders that intellectually gifted individuals' significantly higher scores on scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Edwards Personality Preference Scale, and Rotter Incomplete Sentences Test should not be interpreted as indicating greater difficulties in adjustment.…”

“…It should be noted that these data issue from interpretations of personality inventories rather than from direct observations and that almost all scores earned by gifted children are within the normal range. Cautions have appeared in the literature about interpreting such discrepancies as pathological (Kennedy, Cottrell, & Smith, 1963Kennedy & Smith, 1962). Additional caution is mandated by evidence in each of the reports, with the exception of Pandey's, which was obtained in India and may not be representative of youth in the United States, that significant proportions of the subjects may have been academic underachievers, who, as shall be seen later, are especially vulnerable to adjustment problems.…”