Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Overexcitabilities

The concept of psychic overexcitabilities (OEs) emanated from Kazimierz Dabrowski's original concept of developmental potential, which he defined as a genetic endowment of traits that determine what level of moral development a person may reach under ideal circumstances. The five forms of OEs—psychomotor, intellectual, imaginational, sensual, and emotional—are considered types of increased psychic excitability and specific types of nervous energy Dabrowski witnessed in gifted and creative individuals. The OEs are described as a special kind of understanding, experiencing, and responding to the world. Michael Piechowski hypothesized that these overexcitabilities may be more prevalent in gifted and creative individuals than in the general population. The OEs are emerging as important components of giftedness and creativity, especially in light of the particular social and emotional needs of gifted individuals. The following sections further describe the specific OEs and the research that has been conducted on the OEs in typical and gifted school-age children, college students, and adults.

Overexcitabilities and Gifted Individuals

The psychomotor mode is one of movement, restlessness, action, excess of energy. The sensual mode relies on sensory contact and a need for sensory stimulation, including sensuality. The intellectual mode is characterized by analysis, logic, questioning, the search for truth, and a need for continuous and intense intellectual stimulation. The imaginational mode combines vivid dreams, daydreams, fantasies, images, and strong visualizations of experience. The emotional mode is expressed in attachments and bonds with others, and feelings of empathy, loneliness, and the happiness and joy of love.

Gifted, talented, and creative individuals are known to be energetic, enthusiastic, task committed, endowed with vivid imaginations, and strongly sensual, but they are also known to be emotionally vulnerable. Some are known to be aggressive, others to be morally sensitive. They may react strongly to aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, sexual, and other stimuli. According to Piechowski, the overexcitabilities feed, enrich, empower, and amplify talent, but they may also intensify emotional and intellectual insight, creating a tendency toward perfectionism, unrealistic expectations, and social and intellectual asynchrony.

Research

Michael Piechowski, Linda Silverman, Frank Falk, and Nancy Miller were instrumental in introducing the OEs to the gifted community through research studies utilizing various versions of the Overexcitability Questionnaire (OEQ), which has been used as an essay response instrument and as semistructured interview protocols. The most recent version of this instrument contains 21 questions such as, “Are you poetically inclined?” The instrument is holistically scored by trained raters. This line of research continues today and suggests that the overexcitabilities may be more prevalent among gifted, talented, or creative individuals, and that profiles of overexcitabilities differ among various groups. Researchers have found differences in the OEs among children and adolescents, with those identified as gifted scoring higher than those who are not identified as gifted. Some OEs were found to be strongest in artists when compared to the gifted and to have greater strength in more creatively gifted adolescents than less creatively gifted ones, but the artists in this study were self-identified, and not peer-recognized through the channels of the domain of visual arts. Other research has concluded that the Intellectual and Emotional OEs classified students as creatively or intellectually gifted and predicted group membership from among gifted, near-gifted, and non-gifted students. The authors of the original instrument found gender differences in which females had significantly higher emotional OE scores and males had higher intellectual OE scores. Others studied 9th- and 10th-grade gifted students enrolled in two private Catholic schools and found that they were differentiated from their non-gifted peers based on their higher psychomotor, intellectual, and emotional OE scores, with psychomotor providing the best predictor of giftedness.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution