Suicide Ideation and Personality Characteristics Among Gifted Adolescents

Abstract

This study describes psychological characteristics of gifted adolescents. It also identifies the relationships between psychological personality types and suicide ideation. Participants in the study were 152 juniors enrolled in a public residential high school for academically gifted students. The Suicide Ideation Questionnaire, a 30-item self-report measure, was used to assess adolescent levels of suicide ideation. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers, 1962), a widely used measure of psychological type that contrasts four dimensions of personality—extra-version (E)/introversion (I), sensing (S)/intuition (N), thinking (T)/feeling (F), and judging (J)/perceiving (P)—was used to determine personality types of the students. The results indicated that gifted adolescents did not exhibit heightened rates of suicide ideation as compared to their nongifted peers. However, female students held higher levels of suicide ideation than male students. Female students exhibiting introversion-perceiving (IP) types held higher levels of suicide ideation than those with other types. There was a significant between-groups effect for the judging-perceiving analysis. Students identified as perceiving personality types held higher levels of suicide ideation than those with the judging personality type. Gender, judging/perceiving, and extraversion/introversion combined to reliably predict approximately 18% of the variance in suicide ideation in this sample.