Social Coping Among Gifted High School Students and its Relationship to Self-Concept

Emotional intelligence, social coping, and psychological distress among Chinese gifted students in Hong Kong

“…Students were then invited to attend group assessment sessions to complete three instruments assembled to assess their emotional intelligence, social coping strategies, and psychological distress. These instruments were the shortened Chinese 12-item EIS (EIS-12; Schutte et al, 1998;Chan, 2003), the Chinese 12-item Social Coping Questionnaire (SCQ-12) adapted and modified from SCQ-17 (Swiatek, 1995(Swiatek, , 2001Chan, 2004), and the Chinese 20-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-20; Chan, 1993Chan, , 1995. All 624 students completed these instruments anonymously, and were assured that the data they provided were confidential and would be used for research purposes only.…”

“…While these dimensions do not map nicely into the four branches delineated in the Mayer-Salovey model, they could be distinguished by being either self-relevant abilities (self-management and utilization) or otherrelevant abilities (empathy and social skills). In addition, these dimensions of emotional intelligence were found to predict gifted students' use of specific social coping strategies to cope with their being gifted, suggesting that different dimensions of emotional intelligence might prompt the use of different social coping strategies as investigated by Swiatek (1995Swiatek ( , 2001Swiatek ( , 2002 in her studies. Specifically, self-relevant emotional intelligence appeared to relate more closely to avoidant coping, whereas other-relevant emotional intelligence were more connected to coping through social interaction.…”

Forms of self-concept in gifted high school students enrolled in heterogeneous classes

“…Differentiated socialization, at work in our occidental societies, which focuses on the intelligence of boys and the conformity of girls, undoubtedly plays a role in explaining these differences (Kerr and Cohn 2001). The fact that boys have a greater tendency than girls to consider themselves different and thus holders of a particular status (that of gifted teenagers) leads more in the direction of the results obtained by Swiatek (2001) and Chan (2004); this feeling of difference certainly makes it more difficult for boys to fit in with their peers and the expectations of their academic institution, if indeed they wish to fit in. It should be noted that boys have a tendency to put greater value on their physical abilities, a result which is frequently observed in samples of gifted adolescents (Cornell et al 1990) as well as those who are "average" (Wilgenbusch and Merrell 1999).…”

Lessons From Our Kissing Cousins: Third Culture Kids and Gifted Children

“…Knowledgeable parents of gifted children learn to teach their children, and their children's teachers, that being secure and loved by one's family may be preferable to adopting camouflage techniques in order to procure presumed peer-group approval. Research in the gifted community has found that social coping strategies that rely on denial are negatively associated with self-concept (Swiatek, 2001). Eakin (1998) and Pollack and Van Reken (1999) make clear that TCKs and gifted children share many social and emotional characteristics.…”