Gifted Kids and Overexcitabilities

Overexcitability (OE) is an inborn character being seen as extremely highly responsiveness to stimulus than most people.  Gifted children are more likely to be OE than non-gifted children. Depending on individuals, five types of OE has been described.

Type 1. Psychomotor OE: Characterized with substantially high capacities for being active and energetic, manifesting as high ambitious, frequent movement, restlessness, fast talking with lots of gestures, talk and act impulsively, and workaholic. People with this type of OE could become successful athletes.

Type II: Sensual OE: Characterized with high aesthetic awareness, strong love for sensory things (textures, smells, tastes, etc), and powerful reaction to negative sensory input (bad smells, loud sounds).  An sensual OE child may feel breathlessness at the sight of a beautiful sunset, start crying while hearing Mozart, or shouting out while seeing a team winning a game. Children with high sensual OE often become so absorbed in their love of a particular piece of art or music that the outside world ceases to exist.

Type III: Intellectual OE: People with high intellectual OE are hunger for knowledge and continuously search for truth, question everything, and love of new ideas and like to do theoretical analysis.  This is the characteristic of a gifted person we are familiar with.  The problem for some of these children is that this means we need to consistently provide new sources of information to them; otherwise they will feel bored.   Constantly reading, intensely curious, they ask questions about everything; they always need to know why. People with Intellectual OE frequently love theory, thinking about thinking, and moral thinking. Scientists and inventors often have high Intellectual OE.

Type IV: Imaginational overexcitability: Imaginational OE is regarded as “the power of thought creation, expressed through vividness of imagery, richness of association, liking for the unusual, and a facility for dreams, fantasies, and inventions”.  They are strong visual thinkers and can use lots of metaphorical expressions in speech. These people often tend to mix truth with fiction, or create elaborate private worlds into which they can retreat in order to escape boredom.  Therefore, children with high imaginational OE may have difficulties staying tuned into classroom settings where creativity and imagination are secondary to learning rigid academic curriculum. They may write stories or draw instead of doing seatwork or participating in class discussions, or they may have difficulty completing tasks when some incredible idea sends them off on an imaginative tangent.   Artists often possess this character.

Type V: Emotional OE: People with high emotional OE are very good at perceiving and recognizing of emotional life as expressed through a wide range of feelings, attachments, compassion, sense of responsibility, and scrupulous self-examination.  These people are sometimes painfully aware of their own feelings, often rehearsing inner dialogues or self-judging. They are capable of very deep emotional attachment and sensitivity. Due to the high emotional OE, these people are often accused of overreacting in response to things. High emotional OE may lead to depression. These people can become successful writers, singers, actors/actress

Note: The theory of over-excitability was first developed by Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychiatrist and psychologist, who devoted his study to the Theory of Positive Disintegration, which states that “conflict and inner suffering [are] necessary for advanced development” and would lead to a better society. To Dabrowski, “innate ability/intelligence combined with overexcitability (OE) were predictive of potential for higher-level development.”

To know more about OE, people can start read Dobrowski’s work, and then Google the website for more details. For people who have interests in assessing OE for themselves or for others,  instruments have been developed and are available. (The Overexcitibilities Questionnaire-II, Falk, Linda, Miller et all, 1999).