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Benchmarking Psychosocial Skills Important for Talent Development
Author(s) -
OlszewskiKubilius Paula,
Subotnik Rena F.,
Davis Lauren Cassani,
Worrell Frank C.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
new directions for child and adolescent development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.628
H-Index - 59
eISSN - 1534-8687
pISSN - 1520-3247
DOI - 10.1002/cad.20318
Subject(s) - benchmarking , psychosocial , psychology , talent development , childhood development , erikson's stages of psychosocial development , applied psychology , developmental psychology , pedagogy , business , psychiatry , marketing
How can high potential in childhood be transformed into outstanding adult accomplishment? Research indicates that individuals who become outstanding performers and producers have more than just raw talent in the domain or opportunities to develop their talent—they have the will, drive, and focus to take advantage of the opportunities with which they are presented, and the capacity to persist through failures even as the bar for success gets higher. Despite the importance of these psychosocial facilitators, they are among the least well understood in the field of gifted and talented research. In this study, we reviewed existing literature in order to build comprehensive list of the psychosocial variables associated with talent development across domains (visual art, dance, sports, academics, music, acting, medicine, and software engineering). With the help of psychologists with expertise in these domains, we completed an initial categorization of these skills and asked the experts to indicate at which of the three stages in talent development—the transition of abilities into competencies, competencies into expertise, and expertise to creative productivity or eminence—each psychosocial skill was important. We found promising general patterns of commonality as well as variation by domain and stage of talent development, and discuss the implications of this study on future research into psychosocial skill development.