Emotional Intelligence and Gifted Children

Abstract

Two issues regarding academic and intellectually gifted children are debated to this day. The first concerns the social-emotional competency of gifted children and the second focuses on the question of what is the most appropriate educational setting to support the academic and personal development of these children. Self, teacher and parent ratings of emotional intelligence (EI) were obtained from samples of gifted children in both special and regular class programs and a group of matched average ability and average achieving students in grades 4-8. While a number of small but statistically significant differences were obtained between the groups on the various EI subscales, gifted children tended to show well developed EI competencies, whether in regular or segregated classes, and compared with average ability students.