I Feel Your Pain : Empathy and the Gifted Child

GPA coffee — Research Review

December 2016

“ I feel your pain”: Empathy and the gifted child

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” — Henry David Thoreau

Regardless of your political views and whether or not you believed him, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign trail phrase, “I feel your pain” has taken root in the American political mind. It has, in fact, become a touchstone, an idea to which policy wonks, campaigners, and pundits return time and again; regardless of party, beyond grasp of policy, and even beyond the amorphous “likeability factor,” voters apparently want their candidate to “feel their pain.”

What they want is actually empathy, and understandably so: they want their elected leaders to remember them, to recall their struggles and worries and needs, and that those things will influence decisions by those leaders in Washington, D.C. or in the state capital. And the best way to make sure they will is to make sure they can actually imagine what it is like to live in your shoes.

“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.” — Alfred Adler, one of the founders of modern psychology

Empathy is often easily confused for one or more of its cousins, sympathy, compassion, and pity. Fundamentally, though all of these concepts are other-centric in that they depend on focusing on someone else’s situation rather than your own, there are important differences. This infographic sums up the distinctions:

If you have questions about this article or would like more information or resources, please contact Jill Williford Wurman, Director of Research & Development: [email protected]. Infographic by Robert Shelton1

Pity is simply acknowledging that someone else’s suffering exists — and by saying “simply,” I do not mean to lessen the value of such an observation; a good many problems go unfixed because no one notices that they are happening. However, pity requires very little in the way of emotional involvement, or engagement with the situation you observe.

A deeper level of emotional engagement with the situation is sympathy, which means you actually care about the suffering of the other person — on some level, it makes you unhappy to hear about someone else’s unhappiness.

Empathy involves still more emotionally engagement, in that you can actually feel the suffering person’s feelings — it’s the idea of “walking a mile in my shoes.” Not only do you see and care about what is happening to the other person, but you sincerely can imagine what it is like for them to experience it.

(In this model, compassion is one step more engaged, in that it is the engagement of empathy plus the added desire to do something to alleviate the suffering that you notice, care about, and even feel, yourself.)

“Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing that you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.” — Dennis Lehane, bestselling American author

2 Brené Brown, a professor of social work, offers an excellent example of the subtle but crucial difference between empathy and sympathy in her TED talk, “Daring Greatly.”2 Imagine that you’re walking in your neighborhood and you hear a voice coming from somewhere ahead of you, where you see a big hole in the ground. Here’s the progression of those impulses:

 You feel pity when you realize that the person is in the hole (“Oh, that poor thing, all the way down in that dark, dirty hole in the ground!”).  Then you likely feel sympathetic — you peer down into the hole and say, “Ooh — that is bad”; your sympathy means that “you might have a sense of regret for that person’s difficulty but are not feeling her feelings as if they’re your own.”3  Imagine that the person then shouts up, “It’s dark down here, and I’m stuck and overwhelmed.” Those pleading words may pique your empathy, so your response might be something like, “I know what it’s like down there — and you’re not alone,” and you might promise to stay with them during this difficult situation because you can imagine how they must feel.  It is at this point that your compassion may move you to go get help for the person. After this incident is over, you may go further, petitioning your local municipal officials to fill in the hole so it doesn’t happen to someone else. Note that your compassion starts small in scale and then expands outward to address a more abstract concept — the notion that an unspecified “someone” may suffer in the future.

The necessity of empathy

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” — Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird

Simply put, empathy is necessary for humans to have functional societies. We must be able to work together, to compromise, and to communicate with each other in order for our days and years to go smoothly, and empathy is the glue that holds all kinds of relationships together. Without empathy, disagreements fester and differences of opinion become chasms between opposing camps. Psychologists agree that if one intentionally engages his or her empathy by suspending judgment about someone else (even temporarily), then real listening can take place.

3 Grayson GPA Research Review, 13 December 2016 Thereafter, even if the two parties continue to hold differing views, their exchanges will be more civil and respectful.

The world is, as we all know, a much larger place for our children than it was in our own childhoods, and exponentially more so than those of our parents. Though this dynamic may seem obvious, the degree to which it is different from our own backgrounds may surprise you: a 2008 Pew Research Center study reports that while most Americans move once in their lives, 40% of adults have never lived anywhere but the community in which they were born.4 That statistic underscores the point that adults today have experienced the world in a radically different way from our offspring who grew up as “digital natives.” It stands to reason that our children, then, will likely have many more experiences and opportunities requiring them to interact with a wider array of people whose backgrounds are likely to be very different from theirs.

“Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn... we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.” — Alice Miller, psychologist and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child5

Academically speaking, empathy is a critical component of education, necessary to truly understand history and literature, for example. The reasons people act the way they do may be invisible until you can feel empathy for them — put yourself in their place — where you can understand the motivations which drive their actions.

While it may be true that history is written by the victors, histories written based solely on one version of the story — even that of the victors — would be considered shoddy scholarship, at best. A one-dimensional understanding of events is flat, superficial, and does a disservice to all the parties involved; by ignoring the voice of the “losers,” one cannot fully grasp the scope of the victory or the reasons it occurred. Similarly, many students, especially younger ones, cannot engage fully in learning history if it is taught only through third-person accounts of political events. They may be flummoxed as to why a leader made a particular decision, for example, if their only source of information is a textbook account of what army went where on what dates. By contrast, many students seem to have “aha!” moments when they read first-person accounts of historical events, whether fictionalized or not: temporarily stepping into someone else’s shoes allows them to immerse themselves in the period and more fully comprehend the sweep of history in an entirely new way.

“It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving

4 unless you know one Chinese who is starving.” — John Steinbeck

In literature, of course, the full panoply of human behavior is on display, warts and all. But an author who doesn’t know how to convey the lived experience of someone other than themselves is simply writing thinly-disguised biography — which you can only do once, probably, before your editor asks pointedly if you don’t have anything else up your sleeve. Literature is one way we can explore other cultures, belief systems, relationships, and worldviews, and it’s one of the first ways our children encounter the idea of trying to understand someone else’s point of view. Throughout their school years, students will be repeatedly asked to see the other side of things — of an interaction between characters, of a historical event, or of an argument.6 Empathy is the quality that makes this kind of critical thinking possible.

The experience of understanding alternate points of view through literature has been validated again and again as a way of helping children work through difficult personal issues and questions — it’s called bibliotherapy, and is supported by the work of many educational psychology researchers.7 They understand that gifted children can be uncomfortable accessing troublesome emotions in their own lives, and can be “stuck” as to what to do to move forward. However, seeing a character handle a similar situation and being able to talk about that problem comfortably — because it belongs to the character, not to them (the childhood equivalent of “I have this ‘friend’ who has this problem...”) — can make significant progress possible. Students can also feel like they are more deeply understood and less alone in their worries if they discover a character like themselves — for gifted children, this can be an encounter with Roald Dahl’s Matilda, for example, or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Finding oneself in someone else’s words reaffirms for them that they are not the only kid in the world who thinks that way, or who likes those things; that experience can be quietly but profoundly reassuring.8

Finally, imaginative empathy is fundamental for those who pursue the creative arts. Whether the art form is dance, music, writing, film, design, painting, or any of myriad other creative pursuits, an understanding of how other people experience and view the world is absolutely required for an artist to connect with his or her intended audience. Even work like architecture, whose technical aspect can sometimes overshadow its creative side, requires significant empathy: in the design phase, architects must answer questions such as: who are the people who are going to use this building? What do they need? What does it feel like to stand in this space? What impression do people have when they arrive at work, or when they visit someone else here? A sense of empathy is crucial to answering these questions fully enough to meet the needs of the people who will be using the architect’s planned building once it moves from paper into the real world.

5 Grayson GPA Research Review, 13 December 2016 What researchers know about empathy and children

While a huge amount of psychological research has been done about how adults and children connect socially with one another, work isolating empathy specifically has historically been concentrated on adults; seemingly, researchers thought that children’s experience with and use of empathy was too fuzzy and underdeveloped to be studied effectively, and in any event, was likely to change drastically before that knowledge might be of much use.

However, in a study of 1st, 4th, and 7th graders, researcher Brenda K. Bryant, Ph.D., investigated whether or not she could adapt a well-respected instrument for measuring empathy in adults for use in young children.9 She modified it so the language and examples would be accessible to 1st, 4th, and 7th grade boys and girls and measured their empathic responses to other children of the same sex and of the opposite sex. 10

Overall, girls are the most empathetic students, perhaps unsurprisingly, and feel the greatest empathy towards other girls. However, Bryant discovered a surprising phenomenon she referred to as the “Cootie Effect.”11 Students of both genders had a marked downturn in empathy towards students of the other gender in 4th grade — meaning that in 4th grade, boys were less empathetic towards girls than to they were to other boys, and girls were less empathetic towards boys than they had been

6 previously. The dynamic of same-sex empathy was different: girl-to-girl empathy remained high over this same period, but empathy from boys towards other boys dropped significantly.

While girls recovered their empathy towards boys substantially as they moved out of 4th grade, the boys’ empathy towards other boys continued to fall, and by 7th grade, it was at its lowest point. Bryant describes that when she presented her results to the 7th grade boys,

“ several males indicated that empathetic responsiveness to other males was a sign of homosexual tendencies and foreboded social ostracism. It appears then, that males in their early adolescence tend to deny the legitimacy of sharing male affective experiences and that the basis of this affective taboo is fear regarding sexual identity and social rejection. Furthermore, these concerns are at the conscious level [emphasis mine].” (423)

It is surprising — and sad — to learn that boys have this downward trajectory in empathy towards each other, and intentionally so; regrettably, I have no reassuring follow-on study that shows an uptick back to higher levels of empathy after 7th grade.12 It is perhaps all the more unfortunate because boys this age are either at the beginning or in the thick of puberty, when their world is already so full of changes — they are beginning to date, to engage in more competitive athletics, and to do more challenging school work that often requires collaboration with each other. During this period, wouldn’t it be nice if they could count on each other’s support to a greater extent?

Empathy in gifted children

Gifted children, characterized often by heightened emotional sensitivity, are often highly empathetic, as well. In fact, their empathy may seem overly present in their experience of the world, as any parent whose child has burst into tears about a dead bug on the sidewalk can tell you. It’s possible that there is a connection to emotional overexcitability in that their highly-active “affective radar” alerts them to distressing events and feelings in their environments at a much lower “threshold” than typical children have. This sort of intense response to their world is another expression of the asynchrony that defines them.

Additionally, gifted children are often noted for having a precocious and fundamental sense of justice and the importance of fairness — they are essentially

7 Grayson GPA Research Review, 13 December 2016 “early bloomers” in terms of moral sensitivity. This characteristic is the one that makes a gifted child (popular or not) stand up for a bullied child on the playground, even against an older (or larger) child — she simply cannot bear to see the other child suffering, and can feel pierced to her core because she internalizes the target’s embarrassment and fear. Her empathy in this case drives her to action, which is both admirable and far more mature behavior than we might expect of her. It is worth noting that in protecting a more vulnerable child, she is also protecting herself, though that is generally an incidental benefit rather than an intentional one: by interceding, she is avoiding feeling that pain, herself, by stopping it from happening in the first place.

In many cases, this sort of interventionist behavior has positive social results, as you can imagine — this girl who swooped in to help a friend has certainly earned one in that moment, and other children who witness the event may also be “won over” by her response.

However, there can be a social cost to this precocious empathy. As is often said, just because gifted children are capable intellectually of understanding complex ideas does not mean that they are emotionally ready to grapple with them. The reverse of this is also true: when a gifted child’s empathy is activated by a situation they see as distressing, their reaction may very well call extra, unwanted attention to the differences between themselves and their peers in a socially-damaging way. They may not be able to put their emotional reaction in context, or to scale it down to the same size as that of their chronological peers, and it may be difficult for them to get some emotional distance from it by intellectualizing their understanding a bit.

Imagine a gifted boy in 1st grade who learns from his Scholastic Reader one week that there are areas in Africa where children walk for miles each day to carry safe drinking water back to their homes. (For simplicity’s sake, let’s leave aside for the moment the myriad dangers these children face on the journey, itself.) Though all the children in the class read the same article, and the whole class participates in a discussion afterwards — and even if they all participate in a fundraiser for building wells in Africa — only this little boy has nightmares for a week afterwards. Only this little boy cried all afternoon when he told his parents what they talked about in school. And only this little boy is still talking about it — and thinking about it, and worrying about it — the next week, when his classmates have moved on to another topic from the next Scholastic Reader.

His emotional response is outsized, and he does not have the skills or experience to help himself ratchet back his anxiety and distress on behalf of these children across the world to a manageable level. Does he need to stop caring about these children and their plight? Certainly not. But he does need to be able to “package” it for

8 himself in a way that allows him to go on living his life despite being aware of this suffering so far away.

Obstacles to empathy in the gifted

Just because gifted children are often emotionally sensitive and can be profoundly empathetic very early in their development does not mean they can always access that empathy, however.13 Often, in fact, their very concrete behavior in “the real world” can strike adults as remarkably callous, given the way they may demonstrate tremendous empathy in other circumstances far removed from their daily lives.

For example, a student who is passionate about the plight of honeybees and “colony collapse” (after a Scholastic Reader article on the topic, of course) and has immersed herself fully in the topic, becoming an amateur apiarist in a matter of weeks, may talk ad nauseam about what she is learning in her research and investigations. She may tell you how sad she is for the bees, how confused they surely feel, how lost and lonely they must be when their queen dies and they are suddenly hive-less.

The same day that she fervently holds forth about the desolation of the bees, however, when she is on the playground, she reaches over and plucks a ball out of the hands of another child because she wants to play with it. She has seemingly switched from being the world’s most tenderhearted creature to a character from Lord of the Flies in about ten seconds. How is this possible? For the adults in charge of her on the recess field and in the classroom, this sort of extreme pendulum swing can be dizzying — and frustrating. After all, she is clearly capable of — and seemingly fixated on — understanding the (putative) feelings of insects, but not of her classmate, who she has reduced to tears next to her under the monkey bars? For teachers who see these children make amazing, insightful, and often philosophically deep connections that they themselves had not ever thought of, moments like this can be very difficult to manage — what is getting in the way?

Multiple factors may be at work, not the least of which is competition. Truly, gifted children can be fiercely competitive with one another, often much to the surprise of the adults who teach them. Especially if they have been in mixed-ability environments and they are moved into a gifted-only one, they jockey for position. While they may have been very different from their chronological peers in a typical classroom, they were certainly at the top of the heap in one way — the most important way to them, in fact: intellectually. Their intellectual identity is generally the central pillar of their personalities, in fact, so when that self-definition is

9 Grayson GPA Research Review, 13 December 2016 threatened by the presence of lots of other gifted kids, they may struggle to connect with classmates in meaningful ways, instead seeing them as competition for the “smartest kid” spot in the pecking order.

They may not even be uncomfortable with this lack of social connection, actually — in their experience, other children do not understand them and often do not socialize with them comfortably, anyway. As a result, they cling by their fingernails to the one thing they know to be true about themselves: they are smart — no, they are smarter... than the other children in the classroom. This kind of grappling for position does not make for easy companionship, as you can imagine, and sets the stage for children to eagerly seek advantage over one another. When it is a case of someone else being picked on, it is easy to see the other child as like them in some fundamental way: they are being marked as different, as an outsider, and it is this obvious reflection of themselves that they are moved to protect. When being gifted is no longer a unique identifying characteristic, though, they can struggle to find and understand their place in the school community.

Gifted children may also be characterized as intellectually rigid, a trait which can naturally make it difficult for them to understand the world from someone else’s perspective. In addition to contributing to social isolation, this kind of intransigence can make empathy nearly impossible; after all, one cannot feel empathy if one is committed to an opinion with a do-or-die type of vehemence.

Where does this insistence on one version of the truth come from? Why, from experience, of course. Over and over in their lives, they are correct — and even the expert in the room — to the delight and surprise of their parents, and often about esoteric subjects about which no one in their right mind would begin to argue with them. Their experience of the world, then, is that their word is Truth, and what they know is what there is to know about a topic.

Imagining a gifted child’s experience of school can illuminate this phenomenon: picture a 1st grader learning with his class about fresh water and salt water and where they occur on the earth. In a lesson designed to introduce the concept of relative amounts, the teacher has gathered 100 disks from the math bins: 97 blue ones and 3 red ones. When her gifted student sees the disks, he becomes agitated. He has immediately grasped what she is about to explain, and he knows from a book he read last week that fresh water makes up 2.7% of the planet’s total water volume, not 3%, and he is disturbed that the teacher is apparently willing to teach everyone something that is wrong.

As adults, of course, we see the story differently (because you’re empathetic, though, you can feel this little boy’s frustration, right? I mean, he is right, after all...). For the

10 purposes of first grade, though, we probably agree that rounding up to 3% is sufficient to communicate the general idea. In any event, the teacher is not willing to cut one of the disks into wedges representing .3% and .7%, since that much more complex numerical concept would only confuse the typical students in the classroom. When she tries to explain the idea that “this is close enough,” he is confused — isn’t school about learning things and then filling out worksheets and quizzes with the “right” answer? What is this trickery, then, this “close enough” business? Is she trying to lie to everyone else? What is she playing at? And then his sense of justice may compound his righteous indignation: not only is the information not right, but the teacher’s behavior and choices are not right, either, because she’s choosing to teach them something she knows is wrong (thanks to his helpful contribution, he knows that she now knows the right answer)... and you can understand the origins of his seemingly obstinate response. He is so cemented in his correctness that he cannot be budged to see someone else’s position — based on his own experience with this very teacher, in this very room, where he has been taught that correct answers are important, if not the entire point of school, remember. In this case, the teacher’s main goal of showing her students how surprisingly small a proportion of the world’s water is fresh (or had you forgotten the point of the lesson by now, too?). Ironically, in this case it is the teacher who may wish that this bright little boy were able to empathize with her position.

Another obstacle that may keep gifted children from feeling and/or expressing empathy is lack of knowledge, paradoxically. As reductionist as it may sound, they are children, and so by definition have limited life experience upon which to call to put things into perspective. The 2- or 3-year-old who cries when the leaves fall off the trees (“doesn’t it hurt them? aren’t they cold now?”) does not realize that the trees grow new leaves in the spring to replace them — but only because she hasn’t been alive long enough to learn or to remember that that is the case.

Teaching empathy

The good news is that, despite these obstacles and thanks to the more positive characteristics of gifted children, teaching them about empathy — and, perhaps more importantly, how to be empathetic — is absolutely possible. Empathy, like any habit of mind, needs to be practiced, and deliberately so, in order for it to become a comfortable way of thinking. It is one of the tasks of their teachers — especially in the humanities — to push their thinking into places they have not yet explored, and to expose them to ideas and people and cultures about which they know nothing. Conveniently, gifted children’s often insatiable appetites for new information serves them well in this case, but that doesn’t mean it is a smooth ride. Moreover, their natural ability to make sophisticated connections can help them make out a possible

11 Grayson GPA Research Review, 13 December 2016 path from where they stand at point A to someone else’s point C, even if it’s not a straight line.

Suspending one’s own beliefs to genuinely listen to someone else’s is an unnatural act — but these students need to know how to do it. They must become comfortable listening to people who believe things that are different from their own views, and it’s a natural part of the developmental process for the growth of this ability to ache and be uncomfortable just like the “growing pains” in their bodies. They will struggle, because willfully submerging yourself into the “enemy camp”’s mindset is not easy — shedding one’s opinions, no matter how temporarily, never is, even for adults. But in the end, they will benefit enormously from learning how to do it, not only because they may change their minds once they’ve truly thought through the issue from a different angle, but also because they may NOT change their minds, and now they are more informed about how to counter arguments from people who oppose them.

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.” — Judge Taylor in To Kill a Mockingbird

Judge Taylor’s words above exemplify the photonegative of empathy: prejudices and pre-formed opinions and positions are obstacles that get in the way of genuine understanding and communication between people. Gifted children are uniquely qualified to understand and begin exercising their “empathic muscles” much earlier than their chronological peers, an advantage they can put to good use as they continue to grow as students. Throughout their school careers and their adult lives, their capacity for empathy will be a tool they will need to wield in order to move comfortably through the world — one which is, increasingly, much larger than the one in which you and I grew up. Far from a faddish educational buzzword, empathy is as important a part of their education as any formulas or information they pick up along the way in school. Indeed, it is a fundamental building block in helping them develop their ability to think critically and to feed their hungry brains by deeply exploring the world around them.

12 1Notes and references:

Infographic: Robert Shelton, included in this article: Burton, Neel, M.D. “Empathy Vs Sympathy: Empathy and sympathy often lead to each other, but not always.” Psychology Today, 22 May 2015, retrieved 12 December 2016: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201505/empathy-vs-sympathy

2 This example is from Brené Brown, Ph.D., professor of social work at University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Professor Brown is author of The Gifts of Imperfection; Daring Greatly; and Rising Strong. (The phrase “Daring Greatly” is from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech, “Citizenship in a Republic.”) Her 2010 TED talk, “The Power of Vulnerability” is one of the most-watched clips on the TED.com site. This particular example is illustrated nicely with an animated cast in this 3-minute video: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/partnering-in-mental-health/201408/bren-brown-empathy-vs- sympathy-0

3 This distinction between empathy and sympathy is from Grammarist.com, which naturally emphasized the usage angle of things rather than the psychodynamics at work — http://grammarist.com/usage/empathy- sympathy/. The site goes on to explain that, interestingly, unlike empathy, sympathy does not have to be limited to a person: “Meanwhile, sympathy has broader applications that don’t necessarily have to do with one person’s feelings for another. You can sympathize with a cause, for instance, or with a point of view that resonates with you.”

4 D’Vera Cohn and Rich Moran, “Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home?” from the Pew Research Center, December 2008; retrieved 12 December 2016 from: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who- moves-who-stays-put-wheres-home/

5 Just a brief caveat before you run off to Amazon to add The Drama of the Gifted Child to your bookshelf of readings about high-ability children — the word “gifted” is not used here in the sense that Grayson uses it. Instead, Alice Miller’s book is about children who use the “gift” of psychological defense mechanisms to protect themselves emotionally from the trauma of childhood abuse.

6 As they progress through school, students may be called upon to employ empathy in very practical ways, in fact, through assignments which require them to espouse an opinion opposite of the one they actually hold. Members of high school and college debate teams routinely find out which side of an issue they must argue only minutes before they must speak, for instance, so they must prepare equally for both sides. In order to be successful in the rhetorical thrust-and-parry of debates, they must be able to interpret the raw information they know through whichever lens they (literally) draw out of a hat — it’s an Empathy In Action moment.

7 A perennial favorite in the gifted community, Some of My Best Friends Are Books: Guiding Gifted Readers by Judith Wynn Halsted includes an annotated bibliography of over 300 books organized into groups by topics that are of interest to gifted children, such as creativity, aloneness, intensity, and many more. From a more scholarly angle, Thomas Hébert, Ph.D., is recognized by many as one of the preeminent experts on the topic of bibliotherapy and its use in the social-emotional development of gifted children. This article he wrote for the SENG website is loaded with resources, and includes a list of references to published academic articles, if you’re interested in reading more of the research on this topic: http://sengifted.org/nurturing-social-and-emotional- development-in-gifted-teenagers-through-young-adult-literature/

8 See also Tamara Fisher, “Using Bibliotherapy with Gifted Children,” Education Week, 15 March 2009 for more information on bibliotherapy. The article contains links to lots of specific books, as well as other resources for gifted-child-bibliotherapy recommendations. http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/unwrapping_the_gifted/2009/03/using_bibliotherapy_with_gifted_children.h tml

9 Bryant’s adaptation was based on Mehrabian & Epstein’s “Questionnaire measure of empathic tendency,” as published in the Journal of Personality, Vol. 40, No. 4, December 1972. To confirm that her adaptation of the empathy instrument for children was working properly, Bryant also gave her subjects five other surveys so she could compare her results with those of adults. Her child subjects’ results on all the measures paralleled those of adults. For example, if adults who scored 3.0 on the empathy measure typically scored 15 on Instrument A and 1.0 on Instrument B and 27 on Instrument C, then those same relationships were reflected in the results for her child subjects — those adult measures that went up together in a particular ratio did the same thing in children, and those that went down together in a certain ratio also did the same thing in children.

10 Bryant, B. K. (1982) “An Index of Empathy for Children and Adolescents.” Child Development 53, pgs. 413- 425.

11 No, I’m not kidding: Bryant, ibid. The “cootie” reference is on page 423.

12 I’m not aware that a companion study replicating this work on a gifted-only population exists. However, given the changes in the culture regarding societal acceptance of homosexuals since the study was done in 1982, one could easily hypothesize (or perhaps just hope) that this kind of explanation is no longer the case, or at least has been mitigated somewhat by cultural shifts.

13 See also Joshua Freedman and Anabel Jensen, Ph.D.,’s article, “Joy and Loss: The Emotional Lives of Gifted Children,” for additional examples and links about the pitfalls and social struggles of gifted children: http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content4/joy.loss.eq.gifted.html