In France, based on their practice, many psychologists involved in giftedness issues claim that giftedness emphasizes emotions and that gifted children and adolescents have lower self-esteem that could contribute to academic difficulties of some adolescents (Marsh, 1987). The present study examined the relationship between overexcitabilities, self-esteem, and giftedness.
The overexciability (OE) is defined as an intense energy in five domains (Dabrowski & Piechowski, 1977. The intellectual (need to understand), imaginational (vivid images and fantasy), and emotional (emotions felt intensively) OEs seem to be mainly involved in gifted individuals (Mendaglio & Tillier, 2006). Coopersmith (1964) defines self-esteem as the knowledge of the perceptions and opinions that an individual has on him- or her-self. Gifted individuals are usually considered as having a lower self-esteem than non-gifted (Pearson & Beer, 1990).
After a brief statement of the issue, we will present the main results of a study conducted on a sample of french teenagers. Gifted adolescents were matched with non-gifted teenagers schooled according to their age and gender. To assess OE, we used the OEQ2 which is a 50-items questionnaire (Falk et al., 1999). The French translation of OEQ2 has been developed by Botella et al. (submitted paper). In our study, gifted adolescents have higher scores on intellectual and imaginational OEs whereas they score lower on psychomotor OE; there is no difference between the two groups on sensual and emotional OEs. Gender differences have also been examined. Self-esteem was measured with the SEI (Coopersmith, 1984). Global results indicate that gifted adolescents have lower scores on social and familial scales than non-gifted.