A person's intelligence level positively influences his or her professional success. Gifted and highly intelligent individuals should therefore be successful in their careers. However, previous findings on the occupational situation of gifted adults are mainly known from popular scientific sources in the fields of coaching and self-help groups and confirm prevailing stereotypes that gifted people have difficulties at work. Reliable studies are scarce. This systematic literature review examines 40 studies with a total of 22 job-related variables. Results are shown in (...) general for the employment situation and more specific for the occupational aspects career, personality and behavior, satisfaction, organization, and influence of giftedness on the profession. Moreover, possible differences between female and male gifted individuals and gifted and non-gifted individuals are analyzed. Based on these findings, implications for practice as well as further research are discussed. (shrink)

Are people with superior intelligence also superior in interpreting the emotions of others? Some studies find that an underlying g-factor links all mental processes leading to an expectation of a positive answer to the question, while other studies find that there is a cost to giftedness. No previous study have tested social cognition among highly gifted, or the Mensa society specifically. The study measures emotion recognition in 63 members of the Norwegian Mensa and 100 community controls. The Mensa group had (...) a higher total score on the EmoBio test and was specifically better at differentiating the anger emotion, otherwise hypthesized to be mediated by subcortical processes. There was no difference in heterogeneity between the groups, contrary to the expectation of an autistic subgroup in Mensa. The study indicate that the positive manifold extends also to social cognition, and runs counter to the concept of a cost to giftedness. (shrink)