Predicting psychiatric symptoms by personality types for gifted students

ABSTRACT This study examined if personality types of gifted students predicted their psychiatric symptoms and if the type of giftedness and gender moderated the relationship between the personality and psychiatric manifestations. The Murphy-Meisgeir Type Indicator for Children and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent were used to measure the personality types and psychiatric symptoms of 232 gifted middle-school students in South Korea. Results found that introversion predicted all of the symptoms but hypomania. Intuition predicted the symptoms of psychopathic deviance and schizophrenia and feeling predicted those of depression and conversion hysteria. Other predictive relationships were found between perceiving and hypomania and between judging and depression and social introversion. Creatively gifted students with introverted and intuitive personality types exhibited several symptoms than were academically gifted students of the same personality. Regarding gender, introverted males were more vulnerable to psychiatric symptoms compared to introverted females, and perceptive females had a higher chance to show hypomania than perceptive males. This study supported that personality characteristics partly accounted for the indications of psychological distress among gifted students. Further studies need to examine causal relationships between the two and to corroborate the current results involving adolescents.