Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning (Vocational Psychology)

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Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning

Contemporary Topics in Vocational Psychology W.Bruce Walsh, Ohio State University Series Editor

Leong • Career Development and Vocational Behavior of Racial and Ethnic Minorities Vondracek/Lerner/Schulenberg • Career Development: A Life-Span Developmental Approach Walsh • Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning Walsh/Osipow • Advances in Vocational Psychology, Vol. 1: The Assessment of Interest Walsh/Osipow • Career Counseling for Women (New Edition Coming in 2004) Walsh/Osipow • Career Decision Making Watkins/Campbell • Testing in Counseling Practice

Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning Edited by

W.Bruce Walsh Ohio State University

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, NJ 07430 Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Counseling psychology and optimal human functioning/ edited by Bruce Walsh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-3998-4 (alk. paper) 1. Counseling. I. Walsh, W.Bruce, 1936– BF637.C65 2003 158′.3–dc21 2002033867 CIP ISBN 1-4106-0920-0 Master e-book ISBN

Contents

Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning: An Introduction W.Bruce Walsh 1 The Healthy Personality Susan Day and Patrick Rottinghaus

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2 Fostering Exceptional Development in Intellectually Talented Populations John A.Achter and David Lubinski

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3 Individuality and Optimal Human Functioning: Interests, Self-Efficacy, and Personality Fred H.Borgen and Lori D.Lindley

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4 Person-Environment Psychology and Well-Being W.Bruce Walsh

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5 Optimal Human Functioning From Cross-Cultural Perspectives: Cultural Competence as an Organizing Framework Frederick T.L.Leong and Paul T.P.Wong

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6 Optimal Human Functioning in People of Color in the United States Derald Wing Sue and Madonna G.Constantine

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7 Toward a Positive Psychotherapy: Focus on Human Strength Charles J.Gelso and Susan Woodhouse

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Contents

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8 Strength-Based Health Psychology: Counseling for Total Human Health Alex H.S.Harris and Carl E.Thoresen

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9 Toward a Taxonomy of Human Strengths: Career Counseling’s Contribution to Positive Psychology Mark L.Savickas

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10 Assessing Optimal Human Functioning Patricia Frazier, Shigehiro Oishi, and Michael Steger

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11 Fostering Human Strength Through Diversity and Public Policy: A Counseling Psychologists’ Perspective Rosie Phillips Bingham

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12 Fulfilling Its Promise: Counseling Psychology’s Efforts to Understand and Promote Optimal Human Functioning Shane J.Lopez, Lisa M.Edwards, Jeana L.Magyar-Moe, Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, and Jamie A.Ryder

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Author Index

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Subject Index

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Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning: An Introduction W.Bruce Walsh Ohio State University

The aim of this volume is to focus on how counseling psychology fosters and builds optimal human strength and well-being. Counseling psychology in some form has always been a vital part of promoting good health and preventing mental, physical, and social disorders. The chapters in this book show how counseling psychology plays a major role in helping people make changes at home, work, and in the community in ways that prevent disease risk and strengthen personal and social resources. The chapter titles are as follows: “The Healthy Personality”; “Fostering Exceptional Development in Intellectually Talented Populations”; Individuality and Optimal Functioning in Interests, SelfEfficacy, and Personality”; “Person-Environment Psychology and WellBeing”; “Optimal Human Functioning From Cross-Cultural Perspectives”; “Optimal Human Functioning in People of Color in the United States”; “Toward a Positive Psychotherapy: Focus on Human Strength”; “StrengthBased Health Psychology Counseling for Total Human Health”; Toward a Taxonomy of Human Strengths: Career Counseling’s Contribution to Positive Psychology”; “Assessing Optimal Human Functioning”; and “Fostering Human Strength Through Diversity and Public Policy”: The final chapter “A Counseling Psychologist’s Perspective” summarizes, integrates, and comments on the contents of counseling psychology and optimal human functioning.

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Chapter 1, by Day and Rottinghaus, provides a perspective on the healthy personality. These authors note that defining a healthy personality is a valuedriven effort and may apply judgments too broadly. In particular, healthy personality may be significantly different across the globe and within subcultures. It is in this context that the authors attempt to look at characteristics that underpin how mentally healthy individuals respond to expectations and demands, and they suggest that there is some commonality in the underpinning. Chapter 2, by Achter and Lubinski, focuses on the evolution of theory, empirical knowledge, and practice on the optimal development of exceptionalintellectual abilities. These authors present concepts and empirical support for ways to facilitate socially valued achievement and personal fulfillment among intellectually talented persons. They note that the critical starting point is early identification. Multidimensional, above-level ability and preference assessment can, and probably should, occur by early adolescents to adequately respond to precocious intellectual abilities with developmentally appropriate educational opportunities. They point out that this kind of information can be invaluable for guiding talented youth toward avenues leading to rewarding and socially valued lives. In chapter 3, Borgen and Lindley emphasize that for years counseling psychology has led in identifying human strengths in normal people pursuing typical life goals, such as school and work. Three major domains of individuality that counseling psychology has emphasized are interests, selfefficacy, and personality. Researchers, as noted by the authors, have increasingly shown the important and incremental role of these dimensions in explaining life choices and adjustments. Accumulating evidence is showing that assessment that combines interests, self-efficacy, and personality will better describe the person’s individual strengths and better inform important life choices. Broad assessment measures are useful for efficiently describing broad goals. Borgen and Lindley note that more specific assessment measures have additional advantages. They increase the probability of identifying distinctive strengths and they add to the validity of assessment for specific choices. In sum, these authors note that counseling psychology approaches assessment as the task of helping people generate good options, choices, and possibilities. Chapter 4, by Walsh, reviews selected theories of person-environment psychology that have implications for individual satisfaction and well-being. Interactional psychology is defined as the scientific investigation of a complex interplay of situations and persons in determining behavior. Well-being is defined in terms of the degree to which a person is fully func-tioning and doing what is worth doing. Self-realization, personal growth, and development are important dimensions of this definition. It is in this context that five theoretical frameworks are reviewed with an emphasis on the implications for psychological well-being. Each theory discussed has stimulated some meaningful research that has implications for satisfaction and well-being.


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The basic premise of chapter 5, by Leong and Wong, is that there are many ways to be human, and that the cultural competence model is a useful theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding cross-cultural differences in optimal human functioning. Leong and Wong begin with several important definitional issues and move on to compose a contingency model of cultural competence to analyze and understand optimal human functioning from a cross-cultural perspective. This contingency model of cultural competence takes into account not only cultural value orientations, but also perspectives and domains. These authors further include the dimensions of religious and existential orientations. They point out that the Contingency model remains a working model and needs to be further developed conceptually and tested empirically. They also point out that the basic concepts of happiness, optimal functioning, and positive psychology vary from culture to culture and need to be clarified. Their focus on value orientations represents only one of the promising alternatives. In a closing section the authors discuss the counseling implications of the model. Chapter 6, by Sue and Constantine, focuses on optimal human functioning in people of color in the United States. These authors note that definitions of optimal human functioning are culturally bound and often do not adequately address the values, experiences, and realities of people of color. In understanding well-being among people of color, it is imperative to consider their social-political histories, experiences of racial discrimination, and cultural values and world views. These authors note that it is also beneficial to understand well-being from various cultural lenses because these perspectives may provide mental health professionals with increased opportunities to understand individuals within their cultural contexts. In chapter 7, Gelso and Woodhouse discuss a number of ways that counselors and clinicians can incorporate a conceptualization of client’s strengths into what they say and do in therapy. For example, they can explicitly comment on clients strengths, including strengths that emerge in the context of the counseling relationship. Counselors and therapists can also reframe apparent weaknesses as strengths, or attend to strengths that are imbedded in defenses. In addition, they note that supervisors of counselors and therapists can consciously engage in a parallel process of focusing on strengths in the supervision, just as therapist trainees are focusing on client strengths in the counseling and clinical hour. In terms of a research agenda for positive psychology, these authors envision two general themes: the constructs that are studied and the effects of positive interventions on process and outcome. In chapter 8, Thoresen and Harris discuss how positive psychology constructs may be relevant to the work of health psychologists and health focused counseling psychologists. These authors discuss the potential integration of positive and health psychology perspectives into a field that examines the development and interaction of positive psychology constructs, supportive social environments, health promoting behaviors, and optimal physiology. They have

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selected as examples three relevant areas of positive psychology in which theoretical developments, associated intervention strategies, as well as actual or emerging research programs exist: (a) forgiveness, (b) socially emotional support, and (c) spirituality. Chapter 9, by Savickas, discusses career counseling’s contribution to positive psychology. For purposes of identifying the human strengths and the coping responses on which career intervention concentrates, Savickas has grouped the coping responses into six syndromes of attitudes, beliefs, and competencies: concern, control, conviction, competence, commitment, and connection. In the chapter, he describes the coping responses that exercise each human strength. According to Savickas, career education and counseling, through the exercise of vocational coping attitudes, beliefs, and competencies, focus on building human strengths. The purpose of chapter 10, by Frazier, Oishi, and Steger, is to describe specific measures counseling psychology researchers and practitioners use to assess various aspects of optimal human functioning, and to discuss some general assessment issues in this area. These authors begin by describing various definitions of optimal functioning and their rationale for choosing specific domains to cover. They, next, outline the criteria used to evaluate measures and then describe and critique assessment instruments in three domains in optimal functioning important for counseling psychologists: subjective well-being, meaning in life, and posttraumatic growth. They conclude with some discussion of broader issues to consider in the assessment of optimal functioning. Chapter 11, by Bingham, focuses on fostering optimal functioning through diversity and public policy. She asks the question, “How will human beings live and thrive together” and proposes that part of the answer is in capitalizing on the world’s human diversity. She strongly recommends that we support policies that foster human strength through diversity and in this context makes five recommendations: (a) go back to the basics on which counseling psychology was founded; (b) insist on a focus on culture, race, and ethnicity in all areas of psychology; (c) do the research and promote the scholarship; (d) influence policies which impact diversity; (e) revamp graduate education and training programs to include a distinct, yet integrative focus on diversity and public policy. Finally, chapter 12 by Lopez, Edwards, Magyar-Moe, Pedrotti, and Ryder summarizes, integrates, and identifies common themes for fostering well-being and optimal human functioning. They discuss the chapters in this book in the context of the five major themes (intact personalities, individual assets and strengths, positive mental health, person-environment interactions, and educational and career development) that serve to unite the roles and tasks of counseling psychology (Gelso & Fretz, 2001). These authors also discuss the need to integrate knowledge in pursuit of the conditions that contribute to characterize optimal human functioning in different cultures. To do this they


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recommend increasing definitional clarity, toning down “turf talk,” professional collaboration, a scholarship of integration, and a broader view of knowing.

REFERENCES Gelso, C., & Fretz, B. (2001), Counseling psychology (2nd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt.

1 The Healthy Personality Susan X Day Iowa State University University of Houston

Patrick Rottinghaus Iowa State University

Wisdom is hard won in Ann Tyler’s novels, but when it arrives it is well expressed: In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), a thoughtful character muses, Everything comes down to time in the end—to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? (p. 256) This time framework for “everything” will serve us in organizing our thoughts about what makes for a healthy personality. We look at the question in terms of how you are oriented to the past, the present, and the future. First, we take up a few background matters. One is definition of terms. When we speak of the healthy personality, our meaning overlaps with what many other phrases denote: good mental health, optimal functioning, effective personality, and so forth. The terminology is organized in Table 1.1 along with historical associations. Some definitions from the past hold the charm of simplicity: When asked what a normal person should be able to do well, Freud reputedly said, “to love and to work” (Erikson, 1950, p. 229).

TABLE 1 Ten Concepts Relating to Optimal Human Functioning

2 The Healthy Personality


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The Healthy Personality

Karl Menninger (1937) defined mental health in this way: “It is the ability to maintain an even temper, an alert intelligence, socially considerate behavior, and a happy disposition” (p. 1). Aristotle endorsed a Chinese-menu approach: “virtue, practical wisdom, speculative wisdom, or a combination of these, or one of them in more or less intimate association with pleasure” (Thomson, 1953, p. 28). Sol Ginsburg (1963) settled for “simple criteria”: “the ability to hold a job, have a family, keep out of trouble with the law, and enjoy the usual opportunities for pleasure” (p. 9). We find that we do not stray far from these eloquent dicta; we essay their exegesis. Obviously, mental health is not merely the absence of mental illness, but some extra qualitative buoyancy that cannot be captured by one concept. We try to present a set of interlocking concepts that form a network of definitions. Using words from the medical model at all has come under criticism, of course. White (1973) criticized our use of the metaphor of health in psychological counseling. The metaphor harms us when we accept the medical model, which defines health as the opposite of illness, meaning that we make errors such as elevating extroversion and sociability as signs of health, simply because they stand in such contrast to the social withdrawal we see in depressed and schizophrenic people. White would prefer terms such as self-actualization to describe the highly functioning personality. He also pointed out that a mere list of qualities will not serve to define this personality, in that some components are bound to squeeze out others: “The person who tries to be a ‘jack-of-allmaturities’ may end as master of none, having failed to find what could be his greatest strengths and to recognize their incompatibility with other virtues” (White, p. 7). Jahoda (1958) pointed out two ways of defining mental health: (a) as a trait or (b) as a state: Take a strong man with a bad cold. According to the first, he is healthy; according to the second, he is sick. Both statements are justifiable and useful. But utter confusion will result if either of these correct diagnoses is made in the wrong context, (p. 8) In the linear discourse of our essay here, a certain amount of listing and categorizing is inevitable, but we hope to suggest how distinct elements inform a dynamic structure. The second background matter is one of how counseling psychology is (and has been) involved in defining healthy functioning. In 1980, Watkins reviewed historical distinctions between clinical and counseling psychology. One of these was the influence of Carl Rogers (1961, 1980) in counseling: “The concepts of empathy, reflection, self-actualization, and the fully func-tioning person have come to be the watchwords of many counselors” (p. 77). At the same time, Donald Super’s (1955) view of vocational development as a lifelong process,


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rather than a limited phase, captured the imaginations of the same counselors. Furthermore, Leona Tyler’s (1969) emphasis on individual development as a sequence of choices, “the psychology of possibilities,” provided a blueprint for counseling theory. Rogers, Super’s, and Tyler’s stances still distinguish the field of counseling psychology and combine to give our field a focus on the positive and constructive side of life. These days, the broader world of psychologists embraces a positive psychology movement (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), whose sometimes unacknowledged foundation lies in the philosophy of counseling psychology. In fact, though today’s positive psychologists often act as though they are christening a spanking new ocean liner, we notice that this boat has left the dock once or twice per decade for the last century or so. William James at the turn of the last century; the Mental Hygiene movement of the early 1900s; postFreudians like Menninger, Anna Freud, and Jung in the 1920s and 1930s; R.B. Cattell and other personality psychologists in the 1940s; a raft of theorists in the 1950s, including Erikson, Super, and Allport; Jahoda, Tyler, Shostrum, Maslow, and Rogers in the 1960s and 1970s: all have investigated optimal states of being. Just as regularly, psychologists have complained that the healthy personality is understudied. Witness Gordon Allport in 1955, “We find today many studies of criminals, few of law-abiders; many of fear, few of courage; more on hostility than affiliation; much on the blindness in man, little on his vision; much on his past, little on his outreaching into the future” (p. 18), fretting in harmony with Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi in 2000, “Our message is to remind our field that psychology is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue” (p. 7). Why does the field of psychology apparently suffer such amnesia about the study of strength and virtue? Funding no doubt plays a role, and therefore politics does. It may seem more pressing for society to find effective cures for alcoholism, focusing on the disorder, than to study drinkers who never become abusers or alcoholics who cure themselves (who, incidentally, compose the majority of cures [Vaillant, 1983]). It may also be the personalities of psychologists: As your family has no doubt pointed out, we are drawn to our field because we are crazy, not sane, and we are interested in craziness. And let’s face it, the college abnormal psychology course turns on more students than the vocational psychology course does. Pathology is just more exotic, and here the relationship between clinical and counseling psy-chology comes into play. Because counseling psychologists are committed to helping basically normal persons, the enhancement of life quality is uniquely appropriate to our field, whereas treatment of mental illness is the focus of clinical psychologists (Foreman, 1966). As Super (1955) put it, clinical psychology has concerned itself with “the abnormalities even of normal persons,” whereas counseling concerns itself with “the normalities even of abnormal persons” (p. 5). Clinical psychology is more dramatic than counseling psychology, has more status,

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draws more funding, and gets more press; so the disappearing act of positive psychology may only be an artifact of counseling psychology’s offstage turf. The third background point we make briefly and then return to in various parts of this chapter. This is the point that defining healthy personality is a value-driven effort and may apply judgments too broadly (White, 1973). In particular, healthy personality may be drastically different across the globe and within subcultures. For example, an American widow’s family is anxious about her if she is still deeply depressed 1 year after her husband’s death and apprehensive about her mental health if she stays inconsolable at the 2-year point. A Greek widow’s family fully expects her to mourn deeply for at least 5 years, and worries about her mental health, as well as her morals, if she perks up sooner. These are social expectations that no doubt affect the psychological states of the widows. However, in this chapter, we try to look at characteristics that underpin how mentally healthy individuals respond to expectations and demands, and we believe that there is some commonality in the underpinning. In support of this point of view, Cattell (1973) argued that differences among cultures may be negligible when defining the core of healthy personality: “Intelligence, capacity to control impulses and to work for more remote gains, foresight, dependability in human relations, etc., are almost certainly requisites for adjustment, success, and survival in almost any fairly complex culture” (p. 17). Thus, for example, the Greek and the American widow could both benefit from accurate understanding of social expectations; reasonable assessments of their own interests, capabilities, and limitations; good control over their behavior; and hope for the future. With three background issues distilled—the problem of definition, the role of counseling psychology, and the potential impact of differing cultures—we return to time, the format of everything (according to Ann Tyler’s character). The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI; Shostrum, 1974) measures self-actualizing tendencies. An unhealthy score on one of the POI’s two scales indicates that a person “lives primarily in the past, with guilt, regrets, and resentments, and/or in the future with Utopian goals, plans, expectations, predictions, and also with worry” (Hightower, 1988, p. 528). Shostrum and many others, including Schneider (2001) in her discussion of realistic optimism, use this conceptualization as a handy framework for looking at the healthy personality: in terms of orientation toward the past, present, and future. ORIENTATION TO THE PAST The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. (Wordsworth, 1807/1974)


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Erikson wrote, “To be adult means among other things to see one’s own life in continuous perspective, both in retrospect and prospect” (1958, pp. 111–112). To see our days bound together with ultimate goodness is not only a yearning of the Romantic poets, but all humanity. Your life story is part of your personality. Of autobiographical narrative, McAdams (1999) wrote, “The past is selected and reconstructed such that it can be integrated with the perceived present and anticipated future” (p. 482), resolving problems of unity and purpose in life and establishing an ego identity (for better or worse). The tone, themes, and imagery of your story reflect the traits and dispositions of your personality, and the story changes as (or if) you transform yourself over the years. McAdams analyzed the autobiographies of active, productive middle-aged people and contrasted them with autobiographies of more plodding folks. People of high generativity in midlife see their pasts as having made sense. In particular, they perceive the bad things that have happened as eventually having good outcomes—strength coming from adversity, or a forced change of life opening up unexpected opportunities. The stories of less generative people showed a flip-flop—in their life stories, good things inevitably go bad. This difference between the high-functioning people and the undistinguished is not simply that better things have happened to the first group. It has to do with how you look back on things. Adler (1927) found that asking people their earliest childhood memories produced happy memories among the happy, sad among the sad, solitary among the solitary, social among the social, and so on. He believed that recollections reflect your style of life, your characteristic way of behaving and feeling. McAdams (1999) argued that each of us creates a life story that interprets the past from our present stance. The healthy personality reframes negative past events in terms of positive outcomes. In Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality, Allport (1955) agreed with narrative’s potential: The drama of human life can be written largely in terms of the friction engendered between earlier stages and later stages of development. Becoming is the process of incorporating earlier stages into later: or when this is impossible, of handling the conflict between early and late stages as well as one can. (p. 28) Schneider (2001) described giving past events “the benefit of the doubt,” that is, choosing a positive interpretation to past events or behavior, given that most events have a range of reasonable versions. For example, a psychotherapist may realize that his mother’s terrifying emotional volatility taught him to become highly sensitive to others’ moods, something which now contributes to his success as a counselor. He thus detraumatizes his past. Similarly, we may look back on being poor during our college days with nostalgia (as simpler times), or

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with gratitude (as having taught us to enjoy what we have), rather than remembering an era of misery. In an argument for realistic optimism, Schneider (2001) stated that “we have considerable latitude in deciding what significance we assign to events and what lessons we choose to learn from our experience” (p. 253). In looking at our past, “we can take advantage of the latitude in potential reasonable interpretations to select an interpretation that focuses on the positive aspects of the situation” (p. 254). For example, inability to afford a prestigious private college after high school results in a young woman’s going to a state university. In adulthood, she can choose to look back in anger, fantasizing about how much improved her life would be if she had headed East; or she can choose to emphasize her good fortune in the vivid and diverse social circle she found at State. Schneider refers to such a reframing of past events as “discovering a perspective that is simultaneously truthful and favorable” (p. 254), even though many aspects were admittedly negative. Unexpected pregnancies often illustrate the principle poignantly. Because we often make judgments about our situations in comparison with other ones, we can choose objects of comparison that enhance our satisfaction with our current state (Schneider, 2001). Thus, we might compare our work load with some other era’s when we had far more to do, rather than with the lifestyle of a retired friend. We also might pay attention to positive aspects of the present moment, appreciating being safe and warm in a pleas-ant environment while we are hard at work. This is the type of focus that characterizes healthy personality and increases the likelihood of more positive events and interpretations: “Realistically, having a good attitude is likely to pay off” (p. 260). Cognitive reframing also involves acceptance of the past rather than constant preoccupation with it, a preoccupation that many counselors call “being stuck.” Holman and Silver (1998) found that among incest survivors, Vietnam veterans, and firestorm survivors, people who were stuck in the past were significantly more psychologically distressed than those who were oriented to the future. In all three groups, a future orientation was significantly associated with psychological well-being. Holman and Silver grant that some processes of focusing on past experience, such as searching for meaning and working through, may be necessary in the face of trauma, but “if these initially adaptive coping strategies keep people focused on a distressing and seemingly unresolvable past, they appear to be detrimental for long-term adaptation” (p. 1159). We would emphasize the “seemingly unresolvable” aspect here, meaning that the psychologically stuck people have not been able to cognitively reframe or reinterpret the past into an integrated life story, weaving distressing events into a coherent timeline. Another way of being stuck in (or by) the past is to negate or deny negative experiences, through suppression, repression, or motivated forgetting. In this sense, the narrative has gaps and discontinuities that make the story feel inauthentic even to the storyteller.


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Finally, blame and shame, luck and talent, are balanced. A highly functional adult looks at the past with some parts of the negative charged to others’ accounts and some to her own, and with some parts of the positive credited to the luck of the draw and others to her own efforts. Judging the self too harshly (“Everything was my own fault.”) or too leniently (“Everyone was against me.”) are hallmarks of people not at peace with their past. Indeed, moderation has its merits when considering the past. Instead of emphasizing Aristotle’s mean, perhaps the best possible realistic interpretation of one’s situation is most fruitful. Counseling psychologists strive to promote such healthy views through encouraging informed, yet positive views of past, present, and future.

ORIENTATION TOWARD THE PRESENT We will assert that your goals are an intimate part of your behavior and feelings in the present. However, setting goals is the province of your orientation to the future, and we discuss it in the next section of this chapter. For now, consider yourself in the present—today, this week, this month. Today is a snapshot of your usual functioning, and this week is a prescient video of all the weeks in your future. An evaluation of your mental-health status hinges on whether your point of view, focus, and activity is appropriate to your era of life. We look to Super (e.g., Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996) and to Erikson (1950) for life-span approaches to healthy existence. Both of these theorists identified life stages that entail different challenges and require different strengths. A school child’s task is to get along with peers, defer to authority, and learn material; we do not expect children to plan their own day, or to support their family financially. D.H. Lawrence’s story “The Rocking Horse Winner” (1932/1982) forcefully reminds us what happens when a family’s whole fortune depends on a child’s streak of good luck at the racetrack: The child is ridden to his grave. The work of an adolescent is to find an identity and establish reciprocal relationships; we forgive their flickering and capricious personae. The teenager Hamlet (Shakespeare, 1601/1970) is unable to decide on a course of action, even when commanded to wreak bloody revenge for his father’s murder. His identity is not strong enough to bear the weight of the obligation. Of adolescents, we cannot expect either the resolve or reliability we desire in adult identity, or the tractability we encourage in children. Adolescence is a time when cultural differences may come into play in defining mental health; In middle-class United States, the allowable period of identity exploration, romantic upheaval, and occupational indecision is protracted (say, until age 40!) in comparison with cultures where parenthood and provisioning duties arrive earlier and more imperatively. In these societies, the waywardness and general fecklessness of U.S. teens would be considered antisocial rather than charming.

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In most of our adult life, we are called to love and to work. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness” (qtd. in Rather, 2001, p. 71) (Jefferson, 1788). Little (1999) proposed a model of adult well-being, which he saw predicted by five features of a person’s work (considering that vocational identity is, in his broader terminology, a major personal project). To enhance well-being, the project must possess the following: Meaning (subjective value), structure (manageability), community (social approval and support), efficacy (confidence of progress), and low stress (relative freedom from conflict). Consider your own jobs and projects from this point of view, and you will see why some have been so satisfying and others disappointing or frustrating. Holland (1997) saw all of these features in relation to an individual’s personality (for example, what is meaningful and manageable to a happy dairy farmer contrasts sharply with what is meaningful and manageable to a happy theater critic). Holland believed that the important variable underlying occupational well-being was congruence, that is, a good fit between personality and the demands and rewards of the job. The same could be said for successful marriages and thriving friendships. This notion of congruence is also central to Rogers’s person-centered approach. Rogers (1980) perceived a wish for intimacy as inherent in human potential; Adler (1927) believed that social interest was the pinnacle of human goodness; Erikson (1950) listed love as a basic virtue, and included service to humanity as a form of generativity. The demands and rewards of connection with others are welcome to the healthy personality, both in the personal sphere of romantic love and the larger sphere of community. Marie Jahoda (1958) asserted that the empathic person “treat the inner life of other people as a matter worthy of his concern and attention. Implicitly, he is also expected to arrive at conclusions about others that are free from distortion” (p. 52). In psychoanalytic terms, the empathic adult is not incapacitated by the narcissistic wound. Willie Loman, the tragic hero of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, is the prototype of the failed adult personality: destitute in love and ridiculous at work, his final useful act is smashing up the car so his suicide looks accidental, and his family can collect insurance. (Note that far from being limited to Western culture, the tragedy of Willie Loman has found huge popularity in theaters internationally and has probably been produced somewhere in the world every day since its opening in 1949 [Barnet, Berman, Burto, & Draya, 1997].) The call to love and work in most senses continues through old age, albeit many times in forms different from the adult era. In the United States, we have a


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national problem among people who retire from the official workforce only to find themselves modern King Lears, displaced and superfluous. The situation highlights the way our culture neglects existential issues of aging. We don’t expect the elderly to do hard physical labor, to supervise a workforce, or to patiently endure the rigors of classroom learning and teaching. The tasks of the elderly are less concrete, more transcendental—in fact, Allport (1955) asserted that a mark of positively advancing maturity was “the extent of one’s feeling of self-involvement in abstract ideals” (p. 45). Jung (1931/1960) viewed the transition from the adult to the aged era as passing from a biological-social to a spiritual being; the life tasks of the elderly rest in reconciling opposites in the unconscious and understanding life stories. Jung stands out among stage psychologists because he saw old age as a forward-moving as well as a backward-looking era. Likewise, Baltes and Staudinger (2000) have developed a wisdom heuristic that delineates sophistication in six areas: 1. Strategies and goals involving the conduct and meaning of life; 2. limits of knowledge and uncertainties of the world; 3. excellence of judgment and advice; 4. knowledge with extraordinary scope, depth, and balance; 5. search for a perfect synergy of mind and character; and 6. balancing the good or well-being of oneself and that of others, (p. 132) These psychologists argue that the wisdom heuristic would usefully be included in our construction of a hierarchy of optimal human development. Unlike physical strength and cognitive speed, wisdom is a target elders can still aim for fruitfully. In the popular notion, we idealize the role of the elderly in giving advice and providing seasoned perspective for younger people. Erikson (1950) named wisdom as the virtue stemming from the challenges of old age. To what end? Of course, the ultimate gauntlet of the elderly—to face the inevitable and profess, “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so” (Donne, 1633/1974). The Question of Happiness Maslow (1969) wrote that self-actualized adults “have a feeling of belongingness and rootedness, they are satisfied in their love needs, have friends and feel loved and loveworthy, they have status and place in life and respect from other people, and they have a reasonable feeling of worth and self-respect” (p. 35). (These blessings may come from different sources and carry different weights in different cultures; the list itself is cross-cultural.) We would expect that such a psychologically optimal state would produce a high overall level of subjective well-being, or happiness. One definition of such a state says that on the balance, people with subjective well-being experience more positive affect than negative, across time and domains (Diener, 1984). In his review of

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subjective well-being theory and research, Diener found evidence for two competing explanations. In the bottom-up approach, a person develops a global tendency to see things positively when positive experiences accumulate in life. In the top-down approach, a person with a sunny disposition sees a larger number of events as positive. The top-down approach emphasizes your personality traits, whereas the bottom-up approach emphasizes your history and what you have learned to expect. Further puzzles about subjective well-being remain unsolved, especially conundrums about which direction happiness flows: for example, are happy people more active, goal-directed, and socially involved, or does being active, goal-directed and socially involved create happy people? Here in the United States, a satisfying love life and high self-esteem, similarly, are strongly linked to happiness, but which comes first? Nonetheless, in predicting well-being, individual demographic variables like age, gender, income, and marital status all together account for only 10% to 15% of the variance in subjective well-being (Diener, 1984), leaving a large amount that might be explained by personality and its genesis. The concept of psychological health is neither singular nor constant, but an ephemeral process that yields life satisfaction through its pursuit. A healthy personality does not live in continual happiness. Sorrow is part of life for everyone, but as Frankl (1959/1984) put it, “Once an individual’s search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering” (p. 163). Carver and Scheier (1999) also focused on the dynamic nature of the adult era: “The goal of developing a career isn’t just the goal of finally being ‘established.’ It’s the pathway of steps involved in getting there” (p. 554), and Allport (1937) wrote, “It is the striving towards the known goal that confers unity, not the successful arrival” (p. 350). Rogers believed that each individual has the natural proclivity to achieve selfactualization given the appropriate environment. This formative tendency emphasizes dynamic growth toward wholeness. We are always in the process of becoming a psychologically healthy person. This evolving quality of aligning our real and ideal selves provides an excellent heuristic for explaining the healthy personality.

ORIENTATION TO THE FUTURE We have discussed mental health in terms of your adequacy for the demands of your era of life at the moment. This present adequacy, though, is infused with your attitude toward the future—in particular, your level of optimism. Optimism has such a baked-in quality that it is often considered a personality trait. In fact, it correlates moderately with Extraversion and Conscientiousness on personality inventories (Marshall, Wortman, Vickers, Kusulas, & Hervig, 1994). Good


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things flow from optimism: Research has shown its association with physical health (Scheier & Carver, 1985; Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988; Segerstrom, Taylor, Kemeny, & Fahey, 1998), success in political campaigns (Zullow, Oettingen, Peterson, & Seligman, 1988), adjustment to college (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1992), work productivity (Seligman & Schulman, 1986), and prevention of depression (Sweeney, Anderson, & Bailey, 1986), in addition to other desirable characteristics such as happiness, achievement, and perseverance (Peterson, 2000). A positive view of the future allows individuals to become more engaged in life itself, a critical component of psychological health. Let us investigate some of the ways that optimism operates. Remember Little’s (1999) formula for optimal work: One of the five critical features was efficacy, or confidence of progress. No matter how meaningful, manageable, and socially approved a project appears, if you are not fairly sure that you can make progress, you are stymied. Self-efficacy, a belief that you are capable in a certain area, is essential for success (Bandura, 1986). Teachers of statistics will tell you that one of their major challenges is persuasion: convincing mathphobic students that they really can learn the material. You have no doubt felt the surge of hope at the merest glimmer that you are, after all, going to be capable of driving in Houston, or making your computer and printer cooperate with each other, or understanding Kierkegaard. Adler, in Understanding Human Nature (1927) connected optimism with confidence and other virtues: “There is the way of optimism, in which the child is confident of easily solving the problems which he meets…In his case we see the development of courage, openness, frankness, responsibility, industry, and the like” (p. 25). The optimist, according to Adler, possesses a style that “considers the tasks of life eminently within his power” (p. 25). Feelings of competence inform a basic component of future orientation: setting goals. William James (1890) emphasized the connection between our self-beliefs and life outcomes: “Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do” (p. 310). This relationship is central to Bandura’s (1977) self-efficacy theory. Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1994) highlighted the role of self-efficacy in their social cognitive career theory, which explains the process of interest development, choice, and persistence toward career related goals. In career counseling, we encourage clients to back themselves to seek goals commensurate with their values, abilities, personality, and interests. We often witness areas of self-doubt carrying the day, though. For example, many people who love psychology reject the college major because of the statistics requirements. Also, people often choose classes, majors, and jobs not to pursue a goal but to avoid an activity they fear, like writing (e.g., Bennett & Rhodes, 1988). Again, James (1892) resonates,

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We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, (p. 415, emphasis added) True to the roots of counseling psychology, White (1973) encouraged conceiving of each client in terms of their sense of competence, and their pursuit of their individual interests. In White’s definition, confident people whose interests (rather than their fears) organize their life patterns are the healthy ones. Expectations of progress and success in personal projects (another way of saying confidence) are robustly related to subjective well-being (Diener, 1984; Little, 1999). Confidence is also key in Carver and Scheier’s (1999) conception of effective coping, in that it provides impetus to make efforts toward a reasonable goal in spite of setbacks. Heatherton and Nichols (1994), for example, found that people who successfully made positive life changes, in contrast with those who tried unsuccessfully, reported having more self-control in general and better outcome expectancies, in that the failed life changers were not as certain that change would produce meaningful relief from distress anyway. Setting congruent life goals at long range is not the only way optimism functions. How you deal with stressful situations and daily hassles also provides a useful context for defining healthy approaches to life. People differ in the way they appraise and react to negative life events as well as anticipate future outcomes. Lazarus (1984) defined coping as “constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person” (p. 141). Numerous studies have demonstrated the utility of two prominent types of coping: problem and emotion focused strategies (Snyder & Dinoff, 1999). Problem-focused coping involves active efforts to remove or diminish the source of the stress. Emotionfocused coping involves managing affective reactions. Which strategy or combination of strategies is best depends on the context, of course. An unavoidable stressor, like facing heart surgery, requires that a person manage emotions. A changeable situation, like having your computer break down, calls for a problem-focused strategy (probably backed up with some emotion modulation and foul-language management). Watson, David, and Suls (1999) noted that basic dispositional tendencies, such as Neuroticism and Extraversion (in negative and positive directions, respectively) predict an individual’s choice of coping strategy and level of perceived distress. Maladaptive coping strategies involve denial and stuckness. Optimists use problem-focused coping, positive reframing, and acceptance of unavoidable reality. Pessimists tend to disengage, to use denial and avoidant coping. Optimists even jump the gun and use preventive coping strategies to avoid future potential problems (Carver & Scheier, 1999). In Listening to


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Prozac, Peter Kramer (1993) asserted that the last three people standing in any very long line are depressed. They are unable to think of an alternative plan. What they lack is cognitive flexibility, a quality we sometimes see as the key to the golden kingdom of psychological peace and plenty. It is cognitive flexibility that allows you to find another computer to write on, wash the dog while the hard drive gets repaired, or even continue writing by hand! It is also cognitive flexibility that allows you to see the breakdown as somewhat positive because the dog needed washing badly, and you got a fresh perspective on your ideas from using pen and paper anyway, and the whole thing makes a funny story at happy hour. As Aristotle said, “It is impossible for the entirely happy man to become miserable….The truly good and wise man, we are convinced, bears with dignity all that fortune sends him and invariably takes the most honourable line of conduct that is open to him in the circumstances” (Thomson, 1953, p. 34). The truth is that we never really know what is going to happen, and cognitive flexibility will be required. Gelatt’s (1989) notion of “positive uncertainty” highlights this reality and exhorts us to stay calm in the face of chaos. Traditional linear approaches to decision making are limited because of the future’s unpredictability, and according to Gelatt, we must embrace flexible and healthy attitudes toward inherent uncertainty. Similarly, Mitchell, Levin, and Krumboltz’s (1999) “planned happenstance” emphasizes strategic openness to chance events, allowing us to capitalize on uncertainty. Otherwise, we shall certainly be blindsided. The young person who has mapped out his future in medicine at an early age, complete with choice of medical specialty and residency site, finds himself at the career counselor utterly bemused by a firstyear B average in college. A young woman groomed to fit her father’s footsteps as an engineer and successful in her nontraditional major ends up desolate when she discovers that she abhors the setting and society of her chosen profession. An optimal outlook on the future frames unpredictable events as challenges or opportunities rather than problems (Schneider, 2001). A friend of ours, facing an unforeseen period of deprivation, told us, “This will be a chance to see what I’m made of,” suggesting that she intends to learn something from the experience. Notice also the tone of openness to experience in our friend’s remark, another echo of the interrelatedness among conceptions of healthy personality. A less optimal viewpoint might emphasize the suffering she dreads, or the unfairness of the situation, or the perfidy of other people involved. That viewpoint, arguably, would worsen the experience itself Called on to revenge his father’s murder, if Hamlet had said, “This will be a chance to see what I’m made of,” instead of “To be or not to be…,” we would have a much shorter play, and probably not a tragedy. Carver and Scheier’s (1981) behavioral self-regulatory model depicts multiple levels of concreteness and immediacy stacking up toward a superordinate goal. At the bottom level are the small actions we take in the

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present to work toward the goal, and subsequent levels represent intermediate goals on the way. So, if a young man’s goal was to become a best-selling novelist, he might have “keep a daily journal of observations” on the bottom rung, and “succeed as a creative artist” on the top. This fellow will obviously encounter many barriers. If he is an optimist, he will persist toward the goal and have the cognitive flexibility to see many paths to it, so that one blocked path does not flummox him. He can move to the next. He is not dependent on the outcome of any single effort and can accept thwarted efforts with some equanimity (and indeed, rejection is a way of life for writers). He may come up against significant barriers—for example, a distaste for solitary work and an inability to schedule himself. If these are intractable, he will take a look at his superordinate goal—“succeed as a creative artist”—and ask whether there is another way to define it, a way that is congruent with his personality. He might look into the life of an editor at a publishing house, for example, where the work is highly social and structured by the institution, and yet creative and lucrative. Many of us have had to redefine success on our way there. The trick is to know when you need to persist and when you need to revamp the plan. Career counselors are familiar with clients who maintain the fantasy of becoming doctors while barely making Cs in biology, and fertility clinics swarm with people who believe that parenthood is their only possible way to happiness. But for the healthy personality, “Giving up is an indispensable part of selfregulation, because people need to be able to retrace their steps, back out of corners, free themselves to go elsewhere” (Carver & Scheier, 1999, p. 566). Ongoing commitment to an unattainable goal, or one whose attainment will not yield the hoped-for results, drains a person’s zest for living. Likewise, premature disengagement of effort from a challenging task interferes with the discovery of one’s true potential, thus limiting the attainability of optimal outcomes. For example, an otherwise capable student who avoids working on his thesis because he questions his abilities will not produce his best scholarship. Both of these ineffective approaches prevent individuals from discovering alternative, viable goals. How does a person know whether to persist or revamp? Leona Tyler (1969) said, This requires that he know himself well enough so that he can assess the utility or value to him of each alternative, and that he understand his relationships to other people and to the world of ideas and action well enough to estimate the probability that a course of action he chooses will turn out well. (p. 159) Basically, she prescribes a wealth of accurate insight. There is a common fancy that optimists have an unrealistic view of everything and are untrustworthy judges of situations. Yet it seems that all the good things come to optimists,


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whereas pessimists must console themselves with the dismal and limited probability that they are right. In truth, recent research supports the idea that optimists adapt better to new situations because of their greater flexibility in seeking, processing, and acting upon information (Aspinwall & Brunhart, 1996; Aspinwall, Richter, & Hoffman, 2001). Optimists are even more likely to notice negative information than pessimists are, probably because the optimists believe they will be able to cope with whatever they find. “In particular, optimists seem to be more able than pessimists to vary their beliefs and behavior to match important features of the situation at hand” (Aspinwall et al., p. 218). As Schneider (2001) pointed out, an optimistic interpretation of an event or forecast can be just as realistic as a pessimistic one, given the fuzzy nature of reality. Striving for Wisdom The ultimate healthy view toward the future involves the acceptance of inevitable uncertainty and limitations of life while maintaining a hopeful concern for subsequent generations. These ideas are reflected in Erikson’s final psychosocial stages of generativity versus stagnation and integrity versus despair. In spite of the deterioration of physical and mental faculties, we have the potential (and need) to culminate in a generative state leading toward wisdom. Such integrative understanding of the lifespan (Erikson, 1968) and enhanced functioning in cognitive pragmatics (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), indicative of a wisdom, offer insights for subsequent generations. Erikson emphasized the responsibility to pass on strengths gained through the lifespan to the next generation. He wrote of the unique wisdom of the ages to be discovered and imparted by individuals while maintaining a detached understanding that this knowledge must ultimately serve to support future generations as they face the demands of their own era.

APOSTROPHE In White’s (1973) classic piece, “The Concept of Healthy Personality: What Do We Really Mean?” he contended that most of us would rather go under the knife of a superior neurosurgeon who was emotionally distant from his wife, than undergo surgery by a so-so neurosurgeon with a healthy personality. Likewise, moments of narcissistic self-congratulation, pointless indulgence, ill-advised liaison, single-minded preoccupation, bottomless grief, bootless rebellion, and wild hilarity are significant detours along the road to optimal functioning, which never ends. After an exhaustive investigation of the topic commissioned by the U.S. government and summarized in Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health (1958), Marie Jahoda wrote, “There are, then, other good things in life, apart from mental health” (p. 79).

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Shostrum, E. (1974). Personal Orientation Inventory. San Diego: Educational & Industrial Testing Service. Snyder, C.R. (1994). The psychology of hope: You can get there from here. New York: Free Press. Snyder, C.R., & Dinoff, B.L. (1999). Coping: Where have you been? In C.R.Snyder (Ed.), Coping; The psychology of what works (pp. 3–19). New York: Oxford University Press. Sternberg, R.J. (2001). What is the common thread of creativity? Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. American Psychologist, 56, 360–362. Super, D.E. (1954). Career patterns as a basis for vocational counseling. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1, 12–20. Super, D.E. (1955). Transition: from vocational guidance to counseling psychology. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2, 3–9. Super, D.E. (1983). Assessment in career guidance: Toward truly developmental counseling. Personnel and Guidance Journal, 61, 555–562. Super, D.E., & Knasel, E.G. (1981). Career development in adulthood: Some theoretical problems. British Journal of Guidance and Counseling, 9, 194–201. Super, D.E., Savickas, M.L., & Super, C.M. (1996). The life-span, life-space approach to careers. In D.Brown & L.Brooks (Eds.), Career choice and development (3rd ed., pp. 121–178). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sweeney, P., Anderson, K., & Bailey, S. (1986). Attributional style in depression: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 974–91. Taylor, S.E., & Brown, J.D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210. Thomson, J.A.K. (1953). The ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics translated. London: Allen & Unwin. Tyler, A. (1982). Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Knopf. Tyler, L.E. (1969). The work of the counselor. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts. Vaillant, G.E. (1983). The natural history of alcoholism: Causes, patterns, and paths to recovery, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vaillant, G.E. (2000), Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, 55, 89–98. Watkins, C.E. (1980). Counseling psychology versus clinical psychology: Further explorations one a theme. The Counseling Psychologist, 11, 76–88. Watson, D., Clark, L.A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070.


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Watson, D., David, J.P., & Suls, J. (1999). Personality, affectivity, and coping. In C.R. Snyder (Ed.), Coping: The psychology of what works (pp. 119–140). New York: Oxford University Press. White, R.W. (1973). The concept of healthy personality: What do we really mean? The Counseling Psychologist, 4, 3–12. Wordsworth, W. (1974). My heart leaps up. In M.H.Abrams, E.T.Donaldson, H.Smith, R. M.Adams, S.H.Monk, L.Lipking, et al., (Eds.), The Norton anthology of English literature (Vol. 2, 3rd ed., p. 174). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1807) Zullow, H.M., Oettingen, G., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M.E.P. (1988). Pessimistic explanatory style in the historical record: CAVE-ing LBJ, presidential candidates and East versus West Berlin. American Psychologist, 43, 673–682.

2 Fostering Exceptional Development in Intellectually Talented Populations John A.Achter Concordia College—Moorhead

David Lubinski Vanderbilt University

This chapter focuses on the evolution of theory, empirical knowledge, and practice on the optimal development of exceptional intellectual abilities. We are pleased and honored to contribute to a volume on positive psychology that highlights the contributions of counseling psychology. The scientific study of identifying and nurturing intellectual giftedness, although not consistently given priority nor always regarded in a positive light by society over the past 100 years, is one of the earliest examples of positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It deserves a prominent place in any review of this topic. Like their colleagues in other areas of applied psychology, counseling psychologists have contributed richly to uncovering antecedents to the development of extraordinary human accomplishment. The future promises a continuation of this trend. By any reasonable standard for practice based on science, this tradition of talent identification and development constitutes one of applied psychology’s major success stories (Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Lubinski, 1996; Lubinski, Webb, Morelock, & Benbow, 2001). Applied psychologists in general (Paterson, 1957; Viteles, 1932), and counseling psychologists more specifically (Dawis, 1992; Tyler, 1974, 1992; Williamson, 1965), have an impressive history of quantifying human abilities

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Fostering Exceptional Development

and preference dimensions, and using this information to help people focus their development in directions that enhance life success and happiness. These two concepts, success and happiness, go by other names—competence and fulfillment, satisfactoriness and satisfaction—and embody two of the most important classes of personal attributes studied in applied psychology: abilities and preferences, respectively. For helping people select opportunities for positive development, abilities (capabilities) and preferences (motives) have received more applied-psychological attention than any others. This two-part emphasis can be seen in the prefaces to two landmark publications: E.K. Strong’s (1943) Vocational interests of men and women, and Donald Super’s (1949) Appraising vocational fitness. The application of knowledge regarding these personal attributes to the field of talent development has played a major role in guiding the identification and nurture of intellectual precocity for nearly 100 years. This chapter concerns the exceptional development of intellectual talent and is organized into two broad sections: historical and modern contributions. First, we provide a historical overview of the major people and ideas moving the scientific study of intellectual talent forward over the past 100 years. Second, building on this, we review key empirical findings from recent decades in the context of implications for educational and counseling practice today. Within this discussion, we summarize a theoretical model for organizing contemporary research. Finally, we close with a summation of current knowledge and offer some future research directions. The need for more scientific knowledge on truly exceptional forms of achievement, creativity, and lifelong learning is underscored. This knowledge is likely to come from more complete understandings of the personal attributes characterizing intellectually precocious populations and the environmental provisions that catalyze their talents to full fruition.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO TALENT DEVELOPMENT Several writers date the origins of systematic thinking about nurturing intellectual ability to Plato (trans. 1945), sometime around 400 B.C., when in The Republic, he advocated for early talent identification in order to con-serve talent and educate future leaders. It wasn’t until over 2000 years later, in the late 1800s, that standardized empirical methods for measuring intellectual functioning revolutionized the way such talent is identified. Leta Hollingworth (1926), a widely recognized pioneer in the development and education of profound intellectual giftedness, credits Galton (1869) with first showing that intellectual ability follows a normal distribution. However, not until the advent


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of intelligence testing, with Binet and Simon (1905), did scientifically significant efforts to identify gifted children begin in earnest. For almost a century, applied psychologists have articulated the importance of attending to the needs of persons of high intellectual capacity. They have persevered through fluctuating social attitudes that have run the gamut from uninterested or antagonistic, to quite supportive during brief “crisis” periods (e.g., the Sputnik launch in 1957). Three common myths about the gifted have persisted throughout this time, and are still evident today: (a) the gifted can be anything they want to be in life, (b) they will find their own way to successful and satisfying careers without much assistance, and (c) they have so much already, it is elitist to give them more. During a hopeful period early in the 20th century, O’Shea (1926) wistfully noted, in the editor’s introduction to Hollingworth’s (1926) seminal work, Gifted Children: Their Nature and Nurture, The present writer can easily recall the time when everyone thought that Bright’ children could look out for themselves—as a result of which opinion they were neglected, in the schools at any rate, in order that teachers might devote all their energies to the less able. (p. xii) Unfortunately, nearly identical sentiments have required countervailing efforts over subsequent decades by scientists and practitioners working with intellectually talented populations (cf., Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Hobbs, 1951; Pressey, 1949, 1967; Stanley, 1974, 1996; Terman, 1954; Tyler, 1965, 1992; Williamson, 1965). Throughout this chapter, we hope to review some of the arguments and empirical data that challenge these myths. First, the intellectually gifted cannot necessarily be anything they want to be; rather, their unique combinations of specific abilities, interests, motivation, and environmental support make some paths of development more suitable than others. Second, gifted children do not always find their own way; rather, they are more likely to achieve at exceptional levels when given appropriate educational and environmental opportunities, and are at risk for underachievement when not given such opportunities or when their unique abilities and preferences are not identified. Third, and related to the previous two points, attending to the unique needs of the intellectually talented benefits not only talented students, but also society as a whole when these individuals grow up to apply their realized abilities toward the challenges and needs of the world, A practical implication of the perpetuation of these myths is that educators, counselors, and policy makers have often disregarded the need for special attention or unique opportunities for this population, and instead have dedicated the bulk of attention and resources to those with identified deficits whose needs are perhaps more obvious. Yet, like all special populations, the intellectually

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talented have unique needs that require special attention. This imbalanced focus on deficit versus strength mirrors another historical imbalance in psychology, that of remediating pathology versus building on human assets. Of course, a focus on strengths, a longtime defining emphasis of counseling psychology (Gelso & Fretz, 1992), exemplifies the present-day positive psychology movement (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). A great counseling psychologist and advocate for the intellectually talented, Sidney Pressey (1955), recognized the deficit-strength imbalance several years ago. Using his own positive psychology language, he called for research into the concept of “furtherance”—that which facilitates or enhances full development of talent and personality—to complement existing research into “frustration”—that which detracts from personality or competence. This concept of furtherance provides an appropriate lens for reviewing the contributions of psychologists interested in talent development during the past century. Pioneers and Proponents In her careful studies and schooling of children manifesting profoundly high IQs (180+), whom she admiringly labeled “fortunate deviates,” Hollingworth (1926, 1942) discerned many of the topics considered today as important for nurturing high talent. She recognized, for instance, that traditional education, formulated to suit the majority of students in the average range of intellectual functioning, was inadequate for the gifted because it left them without enough challenging and interesting work (Hollingworth, 1942). Students tended to become bored and disengaged with the traditional lockstep, age-based curriculum. According to Hollingworth (1926), an appropriate response was to allow gifted students “to traverse the established curriculum at a pace that will keep them occu-pied” (p. 273), a strategy often referred to as “acceleration,” but which might be more accurately called “appropriate developmental placement” (Lubinski & Benbow, 2000). Hollingworth argued that students should be instructed according to their level of competence rather than their chronological age. Hollingworth was a strong advocate for identifying intellectual talent at young ages, setting the stage for what might be called an epidemiology of positive development—identifying populations “at promise” for remarkable accomplishments (in contrast to “at risk” for negative outcomes; cf. Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997). Hollingworth (1926) recognized that to facilitate optimal intellectual development, personal qualities beyond intelligence must also be taken into account. She was an advocate, for example, of paying attention to the early interests of gifted children, “for it is known that attitudes and ideals formed in childhood have an important influence in shaping the life that follows” (p. 140). Her belief about the importance of childhood interests has only recently been subjected to empirical study, and has been supported (Achter, Lubinski, Benbow, & Eftekhari-Sanjani, 1999; Schmidt, Lubinski, & Benbow, 1998).


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As one of the first to apply standardized intelligence tests to identify and study the upper range of the normal distribution, Hollingworth (1942) added much to early knowledge about intelligence. By studying her gifted students longitudinally, for instance, she documented the stability over time of measured intellectual functioning as relative status in a population. She, thus, set the stage for subsequent research revealing the power of intelligence in predicting educational achievement (Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Murray, 1998) and career success (Lubinski, 2000; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998) over the lifespan. Among her many important contributions as a pioneer in the psychology of women, Hollingworth (1926) also documented the equality of women and men in general intelligence, countering the long-held myth that females were intellectually inferior to males. This landmark finding surely helped open the doors to greater attention to and opportunities for females in school and work. A contemporary to Hollingworth, Lewis M. Terman, is probably the most recognized 20th century figure in the study of intellectual talent. Terman’s (1925–1956) ambitious longitudinal study of 1528 high IQ (140+) children from Age 11 through adulthood is still in operation today. (Holahan, Sears, & Cronbach, 1995). Curiously, Terman (1954; Terman & Oden, 1947) initially was a skeptic regarding the needs of the gifted. He had internalized the prevailing sentiment of the early 1900s, “early ripe, early rot,” which supposed that child prodigies tended to develop either emotional or intellectual deficiencies in adulthood. His subsequent research not only disproved this myth, but also provided a solid foundation for much of what we know today about the physical and psychological development of gifted persons over the lifespan, which more recent studies with better controls have confirmed (Benbow, Lubinski, Shea, & Eftekhari-Sanjani, 2000; Lubinski, Webb, et al., 2001; Lubinski & Humphreys, 1992). Like Hollingworth, Terman (1954; Terman & Oden,1947) promoted the use of both curriculum acceleration and enrichment to adequately meet the needs of the gifted. For more than 30 years he documented the undeniable success of most of his study’s participants; Terman’s work also substantiated the great predictive power of general intelligence (Terman, 1954; Terman & Oden, 1959)—now among the most robust and well-known generalizations in applied psychology (Campbell, 1990; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Like Hollingworth, Terman (1954) also recognized early on that high intelligence alone did not produce high levels of accomplishment. He discovered that, although high IQ had predictive power on average across achievement domains for his select group, it could not perfectly distinguish between individuals who would and would not become successful, nor suggest what direction success might take. He acknowledged the importance of both “special aptitudes” and interest patterns in determining the developmental trajectory of those with high general intellectual ability, and used early versions of the Strong Interest Inventory to study the latter, with good predictive success (Terman &

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Oden, 1947). He also highlighted factors such as drive to achieve, social adjustment (Terman & Oden), persistence, self-confidence (Terman & Oden, 1959), and a stable and supportive family background (Terman, 1954) as intellectual facilitators because they helped distinguish between high-achieving and low-achieving persons in his high IQ group. All of these nonintellective factors have remained of interest to modern researchers (cf., Ericsson, 1996; Eysenck, 1995; Gardner, 1993; Lubinski & Benbow, 2000; Simonton, 1999), and some of them will be discussed later in this chapter. An underappreciated contemporary of both Hollingworth and Terman was Carl Emil Seashore. His 28-year post as Dean of the Graduate College at the University of Iowa (1908–1936), and his position as Dean of the Graduate College pro tempore (1942–1946) at the same institution, prevented him from the kind of recognition enjoyed by others, partly because he had no students to help in disseminating his writings. Yet, Seashore’s (1922) classic publication in Science, “The Gifted Student and Research,” and his contributions to A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Seashore, 1930) and Pioneering in Psychology (Seashore, 1942; see especially his treat-ment of gifted students, pp. 193–199), are still very much worth reading. Seashore (1922) recognized that identifying gifted students at a young age capitalizes on the enthusiasm, motivation, curiosity, and criticism that mark this period in life, and he proposed educational reforms to better attend to the unique educational needs of talented youth. He comprehended well the needs of the gifted and articulated a concise educational philosophy applicable to students at all ability levels: “Keep each student busy at his highest level of achievement in order that he may be successful, happy and good” (p. 644). This philosophy is consistent with the individual differences tradition in psychology (Tyler, 1974; Williamson, 1965). Another important counseling psychologist working from the individual differences tradition was E.G.Williamson (1939), who like Seashore, promoted the needs of intellectually talented individuals by calling for early identification and flexibility in the curriculum (including acceleration). Early on, Williamson commented that “genius does not always find its own way” (p. 387), and charged counselors with the responsibility of discovering gifted students, assessing the degree and pattern of their talents, and assisting them in achieving “optimum success and satisfaction” (p. 128). Like Seashore (1922), Williamson stressed intellectual comradeship in the counseling of intellectually talented youth. In Vocational counseling: Some historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives (Williamson, 1965), he outlined methods for accomplishing this through the modification of learning environments in accordance with students’ rates of learning. Strikingly similar echoes of Seashore and Williamson are found in Sidney Pressey’s mid-20th century publications (Pressey, 1949, 1967). He published widely, in outlets like the American Psychologist and Science (Pressey, 1946a, 1946b), on the benefits of educational acceleration (while also urging care in


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guarding against social maladjustment). As noted previously, he advanced the concept of “furtherance” (Pressey, 1955) as a framework for cultivating promising young scholars and scientists and helping them become adults who make outstanding contributions to their disciplines and to society. In drawing an analogy to talent development in music or athletics, he observed that “early encouragement, intensive instruction, continuing opportunity…a congruent stimulating social life, and cumulative success experiences” (p. 126) mark the lives of those who become eminent in their fields. Attendant with these mid-century contributions, Paul Witty (1951) edited an important volume entitled The Gifted Child, to which one of Pressey’s students, Nicholas Hobbs (1951), contributed. Witty commented that talented children and youth are “society’s richest but most neglected resource” (p. 209), and challenged educators to “divest themselves of the belief that gifted students can get along by themselves and that it is undemocratic to give them special education suited to their particular needs” (p. 275). Picking up on this idea, and adopting a more activist tone, Hobbs also spoke out in defense of the needs of the intellectually gifted, stating, To develop a most vigorous democracy we must avoid the deadening mediocrity that arises when equality is interpreted to mean that people must all be alike…. Not only must we avoid this leveling tendency, we must actively seek full expression of the differences between people, with a deep respect for the right of people to be themselves, (p. 170) In his classic article, “The compleat counselor,” Hobbs (1958) asserted that counselors have a responsibility to facilitate the development of high intellectual potential. Our next historical figure, Leona E.Tyler, is arguably the most renowned counseling psychologist of the 20th century. In the peak of her career, she had the most popular texts in both counseling (Tyler, 1953) and individual differences psychology (Tyler, 1965). Earlier in her career, she also worked on Terman’s longitudinal study. An important shift in the direction of talent development research was noted in the 1960s. Tyler (1965) observed that until this time, the study of individual differences was nearly synonymous with the study of general intelligence (cf., Jenkins & Paterson, 1961). The shift was toward recognizing and studying “special talents” in addition to general ability. As previously noted, both Terman (1954; Terman & Oden, 1947) and Hollingworth (1926) recognized that several dimensions of individual differences contributed to the fulfillment of intellectual promise but, at the time, “with regard to testing for special talents, psychological technique has not advanced so far” (Hollingworth, pp. 32–33). Tyler (1965) pointed out that, although specific intellectual abilities are fairly highly correlated with one another and their communality isolates the construct of

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general intelligence, these correlations are not perfect. Enough variability exists to identify individuals with tilted ability profiles. For instance, referencing data from Project TALENT, a longitudinal study of over 400,000 high school students (Flanagan & Cooley, 1966), Tyler (1974) reported that 16% of students entering college scored above the 90th percentile on a test of general aptitude, but 35% scored in this range on one or more of the specific abilities (quantitative, scientific, or technical) assessed, Tyler, thus, demonstrated that the landscape of differential intellectual potential is vast (cf., Humphreys, Lubinski, & Yao, 1993). Our final historical figure, Julian C. Stanley, systematically exploited that differential potential. Likely the most notable psychologist in the late 20th century to study intellectually precocious youth is Julian C.Stanley. With his Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) research and service program, initiated at Johns Hopkins University in 1971, Stanley advocated for the widespread use of above-level testing of specific abilities to identify intellectually precocious young adolescents (Keating & Stanley, 1972; Stanley, 1977). Stanley and his colleagues were the first to systematically use college entrance exams (e.g., SAT, ACT) to differentiate levels of ability in both math and verbal domains for gifted adolescents (Ages 12–14). By raising the ceiling of test difficulty, above-level ability testing produced a greater spread of scores among students who had reached the measurement limits on in-grade school achievement tests, thereby distinguishing the able from the exceptionally able and the superbly able in a given domain. Such testing has given talented students, and their parents, teachers, and counselors a clearer picture of students’ exceptional intellectual strengths, as well as their relative weaknesses. This valuable information cannot be gleaned from high-flat performance on gradelevel achievement tests or a test of general intelligence; methods that, when used exclusively, contribute to misperceptions of multipotentiality among the intellectually talented (Achter, Benbow, & Lubinski, 1997; Achter, Lubinski, & Benbow, 1996). Stanley and colleagues have documented nearly 30 years of success in using above-level ability testing to tailor differential educational programming to enhance academic achievement and personal adjustment (Benbow, 1991; Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Stanley, 2000). By successfully applying new methods for early identification and for measuring specific abilities, Stanley further validated the unique needs of intellectually precocious students that early pioneers expressed (in particular, Hollingworth, Pressey, Seashore, Terman, Tyler, & Williamson). In fact, Stanley’s work is perhaps the best exemplar to date of an applied psychological enterprise for facilitating what Pressey (1955), whom Stanley knew personally, called “furtherance.” This concludes our brief overview of early protagonists and the applied psychological work they have contributed to this important sphere of human capital. Some of the most distinguished applied (including counseling)


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psychologists of all time helped in developing the area of talent development. Indeed, four of the historical figures outlined previously served as American Psychological Association presidents: Seashore (1911), Terman (1923), Hobbs (1966), and Tyler (1973). We recommend reviewing the original sources cited in this chapter for a richer appreciation of the trends developed and encouraged by our predecessors. Collectively, the work of these early pioneers revealed the existence of a vast amount of quantitative and qualitative potential in this special population, highlighting the fact that although the gifted are distinguished by their general intellectual capacity, they are not a categorical type. It is not surprising that the individual differences tradition in counseling psychology— with its appreciation for within-group variability, emphasis on individual assessment, and sensitivity to idiographic detail (Dawis, 1992)—found the study of intellectually gifted populations fascinating for applying its measurement tools, theories of human development, and penchant for social advocacy. The trends reviewed previously and the empiricism supporting their psychoeducational significance are important to keep in mind, not only for understanding where we are at today, but also for gaining a purchase on ways to accomplish constructive advances.

MODERN EMPIRICAL ADVANCES Thanks to the groundwork established by many early individual-differences investigators, modern methods of synthesizing empirical studies have produced key psychological advances that promote the optimal development of intellectual talent. Contemporary findings have improved our understanding of the antecedents to educational and vocational choice, and of performance after choice (Dawis, 2001). In particular, we now have a much better understanding of the major interest dimensions (Day & Rounds, 1998; Holland, 1996) and their contribution to educational-vocational choice (Lubinski, 2001; Savickas & Spokane, 1999); we also possess a better understanding of human-intellectual abilities (Carroll, 1993) and their contribution to the level of educationalvocational achievement and work performance (Gottfredson, 1997; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Over the past 30 years, these advances have contributed to a marked escalation of knowledge regarding the psychological nature and correlates of intellectual precocity, which have, in turn, enhanced gifted education. What has accrued in the study of intellectually talented youth blends seamlessly with the modern advances on the nature and organization of cognitive abilities (Carroll, 1993), educational-vocational interests (Day & Rounds, 1998; Holland, 1996), and more encompassing theoretical models of positive psychological development (Ackerman, 1996; Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Lubinski, 2000; Lubinski & Benbow, 2000) based primarily on the study of heterogeneous adult

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populations. The utility of ap-plying these individual differences concepts to studying and understanding intellectually precocious youth supports the idea that intellectual giftedness among youth is best construed in terms of precocity, or development that is advanced for its age (Benbow & Stanley, 1996). The Contributions of SMPY As noted previously, elements of many contemporary advances may be traced to Stanley’s work, whose longitudinal study of precocious youth, SMPY, significantly changed the landscape of gifted education. At a time when many social scientists were following Kuhn’s (1962) recommendations for scientific revolutions, by jettisoning the “normal science” of their disciplines and purporting “paradigm shifts,” Stanley (1974, 1996; Keating & Stanley, 1972) built on the work of earlier applied psychologists to reach new heights. Stanley did not reject what the construct of general intelligence had to offer gifted education. Rather, he assimilated this powerful dimension of psychological diversity and then extended the psychometric approach to major group factors for identifying and developing more specific intellectual strengths. Because of his interest and experience in identifying and developing scientific talent, Stanley began in 1969 by studying mathematical reasoning ability (Keating & Stanley, 1972; Stanley, 1973, 1974). However, by 1980, SMPY was devoting an equal amount of attention to verbal reasoning ability (Stanley, 1996). To study long-term outcomes and the development of talent across the lifespan, SMPY—now based at Vanderbilt University—is currently tracking over 5000 intellectually precocious youth identified through talent searches by Age 13 as being in the top 1% in verbal or mathematical reasoning ability (Lubinski & Benbow, 1994; Stanley, 1996). The remainder of this chapter will focus on research findings from SMPY, as this is one of the largest contemporary studies of intellectual talent, and the one with which we are involved and most familiar. Identifying intellectually precocious youth through assessment tools initially designed for college-going high-school seniors is one of applied psychology’s most impressive contributions to the conservation and development of human talent to date (Benbow et al., 2000; Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Lubinski, 1996, 2000; Lubinski, Webb et al., 2001; Stanley, 1954, 1990, 2000; Webb, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2002). The assessment of gifted youth at Ages 12 or 13 using abovelevel tests such as SAT–Math and SAT-Verbal produces an ability profile that is quite diagnostic (Benbow & Lubinski, 1996; Benbow & Stanley, 1996). For example, researchers at SMPY have observed that many intellectually talented individuals exhibit differential strengths in either mathematical or verbal reasoning in adolescence (Achter et al., 1996). Over time, these differential areas of strength forecast the selection of contrasting educational and career paths (Achter et al., 1999; Lubinski & Benbow, 2000; Lubinski, Benbow, Shea,


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Eftekhari-Sanjani, & Halvorson, 2001; Lubinski, Webb, et al, 2001). This information can meaningfully influence practice. Educators and counselors equipped with this specific ability information can differentially plan educational programs that are developmentally appropriate for bright youth. Over the last 10 years, particularly compelling evidence also has documented the importance of assessing personal attributes beyond abilities in this special population, just as Hollingworth and Terman anticipated. Among intellectually precocious young adolescents, conventional preference questionnaires initially designed for adults have revealed marked individual differences (Achter et al., 1996), stability over 15- and 20-year-intervals (Lubinski, Benbow, & Ryan, 1995; Lubinski, Schmidt, & Benbow, 1996), and construct (including predictive) validity (Achter et al., 1999; Schmidt, Lubinski, & Benbow, 1998). The assessment of preferences in an above-level format can help educators and counselors refine recommendations to gifted youth by highlighting applications of talent that could maximize satisfaction. Positive findings underscoring the importance of diverse intellectual and nonintellectual attributes have required a multidimensional model for conceptualizing talent development—one that insists on more comprehensive assessments on which to base longitudinal inquiry, applied practice, and the design of more optimal learning environments for gifted youth. The model utilized by SMPY is the Theory of Work Adjustment (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984; Lofquist & Dawis, 1991). Theoretical Underpinnings: Person-Environment Fit and the Theory of Work Adjustment For nearly a century, psychological approaches to person-environment fit (PE fit; Rounds & Tracey, 1990) have strived to understand the process of career choice. The Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) is a modern-day descendent of work dating back to Parson’s (1909) Choosing a Vocation, which inspired the articulation of trait-and-factor theory in vocational psychology (Paterson, 1957; Williamson, 1939), the foundation of TWA. Roe’s (1956) pioneering framework linking personal characteristics (interests & abilities) to work environments is also squarely centered within this tradition, as is Holland’s (1985, 1996) Congruence Theory. Yet, TWA is ar-guably the most comprehensive PE fit theory today. Although it was initially developed to conceptualize work adjustment in adult populations, TWA has broader implications ranging from educational to industrial psychology (Lubinski, 2000). Lubinski and Benbow (2000) have extended its use to organizing the ability-preference findings from SMPY summarized previously, creating a multidimensional approach for conceptualizing talent development and lifelong learning.

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According to TWA, optimal learning and work environments are defined by the co-occurrence of two broad dimensions of correspondence. The first is satisfactoriness (a match between ability & ability requirements) and the second is satisfaction (a match between preferences like interests & values & the rewards typical of contrasting learning & work environments). For further explication of this model, and how it connects with other theoretical frameworks for understanding ability (cf., Carroll, 1993) and interest dimensions (cf., Holland, 1996; Prediger, 1982), see Lubinski and Benbow (2000); for applied practice in gifted education, see Benbow and Lubinski (1997) and Lubinski and Benbow (1995). Fig. 2.1 contains a graphical representation of TWA (on the right) and its related ability and interest components (on the left) that help guide assessment of the person (or individual) side of the PE fit model. Achter et al. (1999) reported longitudinal findings from SMPY in support of the TWA-based model for conceptualizing and promoting talent development. By showing that age-13 assessments on preference dimensions added incremental validity to age-13 assessment of mathematical and verbal abilities in predicting educational outcomes at age 23, this study documented the distinctive advantage of assessing both abilities and preferences when working with talented youth. Achter et al. administered the SAT and Airport, Vernon, & Lindzey’s (1970) Study of Values (SOV) to 432 intellectually precocious young adolescents, and then surveyed them again 10 years later, after they had secured college degrees. College majors were categorized into three broad criterion groups; Math-Science, Humanities, and Other The SAT mathematical and verbal measures accounted for 10% of the variance between these groups by themselves, and the five SOV scales accounted for an additional 13% of variance. Given the heterogeneity within these three broad degree-groupings, and considering that time-one assessment occurred at age 13, accounting for 23% of the variance was truly impressive. Fig. 2.2 depicts discriminant analysis classification accuracy into the three criterion groups, based on both ability and preference dimensions. Note that discriminant loadings (contained in the structure matrix) support interpretation of distinct math–science and humanities dimensions, with math ability and theoretical values loading most strongly on Function 1 (coupled with negative loadings for social & religious values) and verbal ability and aesthetic values loading most strongly on Function 2.

FIG. 2.1. The Theory of Work Adjustment (right) is combined with the radex scaling of cognitive abilities (upper left) and the Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional (RIASEC) hexagon of interests (lower left) for conceptualizing personal attributes relevant to learning and work (Lubinski & Benbow, 2000). The letters within the cognitive ability arrangement denote different regions of concentration, whereas their accompanying numbers increase as a function of complexity. Contained within the RIASEC is a simplification of this hexagon. Fallowing Prediger (1982), it amounts to a two-dimensional structure of independent dimensions: people-things and data-ideas, which underlie RIASEC. The dotted line running down the individual and environment sectors of Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) illustrates that TWA places equal emphasis on assessing the personal attributes (abilities and interests) and assessing the environment (abilities requirements & reward structure).

Counseling Psychology and Optimal Human Functioning 37

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FIG. 2.2. Group centroids and discriminant-structure matrix (Achter et al., 1999), The bivariate group centroids for the total sample were (Function 1, followed by Function 2): Math-Science (.43, −.05); humanities (−.29, .60); and Other (−.57, −.21). To make the scatter plot less cluttered, each bivariate point represents an average of two participants’ discriminant scores (most typically, the closest geometrically). Percentages were computed using all individual data points. SOV=Study of Values; SAT=Scholastic Aptitude Test; F1=Function 1; F2=Function 2.

TWA’s breadth encompasses several rich traditions that have served applied psychology well and have contributed greatly to the study of talent development. TWA continues to serve as a positive framework for conceptualizing studies of the SMPY cohorts. Longitudinal Findings Emerging in the 21st Century In the remaining pages, fresh longitudinal findings are presented, organized around three critical topics for understanding, assisting, and studying talent development: ability level, ability pattern, and ability underidentification. The TWA framework nicely organizes all of these findings.


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Ability Level. The range of individual differences in human abilities is huge, and the magnitude of these differences is sometimes underappre-ciated. Consider, for example, general intelligence. In terms of IQ points, scores within the top 1% on general intellectual ability range from approximately 137 to well over 200, a tremendous amount of quantitative variation among an already highly select group. The same is true for specific abilities. However, the question often asked is whether these differences in ability level make realworld differences in the lives of people. Or, to paraphrase the late Donald G. Paterson, (R. V. Dawis, Personal Communication, 2000), “Do these differences make a difference?” Recent longitudinal reports unequivocally reveal that they do. Extending a study of quantitative differences in educational and career outcomes between gifted individuals in the top vs. the bottom quartiles of the top 1% in mathematical ability (Benbow, 1992), Lubinski, Webb, et al. (2001) studied an independent sample of 320 profoundly gifted individuals, identified for their exceptional (i.e., top 1/10,000) mathematical or verbal reasoning ability at Age 13 (M estimated IQ>180). By Age 23, 93% of this group had obtained bachelor’s degrees, 31% had earned master’s degrees, and 12% had completed doctoral degrees. Furthermore, fully 56% of this select group expressed intentions to pursue doctorates, a number over 50 times the base rate expectation (viz., 1% in the general population, U.S. Department of Education, 1997), By comparison, studies of persons in the highly able, but less select, top 1% of cognitive ability have revealed pursuit of doctoral degrees at 25 times base rate expectations (Benbow et al., 2000)—still remarkable, but only half the rate observed among the top 1 in 10,000. In addition, as impressive as this “difference that makes a difference” is, it does not tell the whole story regarding the magnitude of achievement in the higher ability group. For example, among those pursuing doctorates in the top 1 in 10,000 study (Lubinski, Webb, et al., 2001), 42% were doing so at universities ranked within the top 10 in the United States, another indication of the extraordinary promise of this group. By comparison, only 21% of the top 1 in 100 (Benbow et al., 2000) were pursuing doctorates at universities ranked in the top 10. An abbreviated listing of individual achievements attained by the top 1 in 10,000 group by Age 23 (see Table 2.1) further underscores the real-world significance of their ability level. It certainly appears that increased ability level translates into increased achievement among those in the top 1% (or the top ⅓ of the ability range), just as they do in the general population (Murray, 1998). It will be fascinating to observe the achievements and impact these highly talented individuals will have as SMPY tracks their lifespan development.

TABLE 2.1 Awards and Special Accomplishments of the Top 1 in10,000 in Mathematical or Verbal Reasoning Ability

40 Fostering Exceptional Development


41

Ability Pattern. Attention to the bottom right quadrant of Table 2.1 reveals another critical factor for understanding and nurturing talented youth: ability pattern. Lubinski, Webb, et al. (2001) divided their top 1 in 10,000 sample into three groups based on individual ability profiles. Two groups were tilted (either High-Math or High-Verbal) and one was more intellectually uniform or flat (High-Flat). The High-Flat group had SAT-Math and SAT-Verbal scores that were within one standard deviation of the other. The other two groups had contrasting intellectual strengths: the High-Math group had SAT-Math scores greater than one standard deviation above SAT-Verbal scores, whereas the High-Verbal group exhibited the inverse pattern. These three ability patterns, drawn from age 13 assessments, eventuated in distinct developmental trajectories (see next). These three phenotypic patterns also are being examined by the human genome project, seeking to uncover general, and specific genetic markers of human intelligence (Chorney et al., 1998; Plomin, 1999). Lubinski, Webb, et al. (2001) compiled the idiographic accomplishments and awards shared in open-ended questions and placed them in one of three clusters: Humanities and Arts, Science and Technology, and Other (Table 2.1). They then went back to ascertain whether these three clusters were differentially representative of their three ability groups. Of those listing accomplishments in science and technology (see Table 2.1), three fourths were in the High-Math group. By comparison, two thirds of those listing accomplishments in the humanities and arts were in the High-Verbal group. High-Flat participants reported similar numbers of accomplishments in the sciences and humanities clusters. It is evident that ability pattern relates to the types of activities to which these individuals devoted time and effort. Moreover, differential course preferences among these three groups in high school and college anticipated these qualitative differences in achievement (see Fig. 2.3). The High-Math group consistently preferred math-science courses relative to the humanities, whereas the inverse was true for the High-Verbal group; results among the High-Flat group were, again, intermediate. Other investigations on the longitudinal significance of ability pattern, using more comprehensive assessments, have generated even more refined predictions. For example, Shea, Lubinski, and Benbow (2001) tracked a group of over 550 individuals representing the top 0.5% in general intellectual ability over 20 years. They demonstrated that verbal, mathematical, and spatial abilities, assessed in early adolescence, were related in distinct ways to subsequent educational-vocational group membership in engineering, physical sciences, biology, humanities, law, social sciences, and business. Figures 2.4 and 2.5 highlight the configural arrangement of bachelor degree groups (Fig. 2.4)

FIG. 2.3. Participants’ favorite course in high school and in college (Lubinski, Webb, et al., 2001). Percentages in a given column do not necessarily sum to 100% because only participants indicating either math—sciences or humanities courses are displayed. Significance tests for differences among groups for favorite course are as follows: High School Math-Sciences χ2(df=2)=20.7, P

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