The Openness of the Inner World of Students with Explicit and Tacit Forms of Intellectual Giftedness

The article is devoted to openness as the system property of the inner world of gifted students. The generalization of protective types of behavior, the openness of the cognitive position and the enriched worldview are considered as the openness indices. We hypothesized that intellectually gifted students have a higher openness of the inner world as compared to the general high school students. Three groups of participants were involved in the study: 1) students with the explicit form of intellectual giftedness; 2) students with tacit form of intellectual giftedness; and 3) general students. The author’s graphical method alongside with the traditional psycho-diagnostic instruments was used to study the student’s worldview. The results after the statistical analyses indicate that there are significant differences between student groups on a number of studied parameters (with p <0,05). The author concludes that enriched worldview, openness of the cognitive position, narrow repertoire of psychological defenses with predominant use of adaptive coping strategies indicate a higher level of openness of the inner world of intellectually gifted students as compared to their non-gifted peers.

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