Equally cursed and blessed: Do gifted and talented children experience poorer mental health and psychological well-being?

Since the 19th century, contradictory reports in theoretical and empirical research papers have suggested that being ‘gifted and talented’ is either a risk factor (it is associated with indicators of more negative mental health and well-being) or a protective factor (it is connected to positive psychological outcomes) when these individuals are compared to the general population.

This review utilises a systematic approach to searching and analysing the extant literature in the field of gifted and talented children and young people’s mental health and psychological well-being. In total, 29 studies are judged to meet the inclusion/exclusion criteria, each directly comparing the mental health and psychological well-being of gifted and non-gifted learners.

Overall, the review reveals that gifted and talented children and young people have more positive scores on measures of mental health and psychological well-being than non-gifted individuals. However, the mean effect size is small and thus unlikely to be significantly meaningful when generalised to real-world populations. The studies are examined in terms of the aspect of well-being investigated, the specificity of outcome measure used, and the age, gender, setting and nature of giftedness of the participants, to determine whether these are related to the results obtained. It is concluded that the aspect of mental health being measured, as well as the gender of the individual and the area in which they are gifted, all contribute to accounting for the variability in reported outcome measure scores. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and recommendations for future research are identified.