Personality traits and domain-specific quality of giftedness

Abstract

Starting from the contemporary understanding of giftedness as a domain-specific quality, which is not reflected only in the development of certain types of skills, but also in different combinations of personality traits, the research was conducted with the aim to determine distinctive personal characteristics of gifted students in different fields: music, arts, sports and mathematics. Dependent variables were the following: basic dimensions of personality - the "Big Five " and disposition towards originality. The research was conducted in Serbia, on a sample of 473 respondents attending specialised high schools for gifted in Novi Sad, Belgrade and Kraljevo. The results pointed to the importance of personality traits for the development of specific quality of giftedness, manifested in a particular domain. The conclusion is that the phenomenon of giftedness could be precisely perceived only if it is set in the framework of individual domains, and that in addition to the multi-dimensionality, a reference framework of the research on this issue has to be defined and placed in terms of the specific domain of manifesting excellence.