The Wiley Handbook of Genius

23 Lifetime Biopsychosocial Trajectories of the Terman Gifted Children Health, Well-Being, and Longevity

Katherine A. Duggan and Howard S. Friedman

A century ago, the Stanford psychologist, Lewis Terman, set out to study “a nation's resources of intellectual talent,” which he saw as “among the most precious it will ever have” (Terman, 1925, p. v). Following up on Francis Galton's (1869) studies of genius and Alfred Binet's pioneering studies of intelligence, Professor Terman was very concerned with the nurturance of intellectual talent and the study of its predictors. At the time, society had what he believed were erroneous and detrimental social perceptions of the highly gifted, including the general perception that they were often abnormal, psychotic, or likely to burn out quickly (Terman, 1954). Terman initially called his research “Genetic Studies of Genius,” but the work soon turned into a very broad study of long-term psychosocial development. He recruited a large number of very bright children (with an eventual total of 1,528 participants), and the children have been followed by Terman, colleagues, and successors ever since. We recently met (in December 2012) with one of the participants, who was recruited in 1918 and is at the time of writing (2013) 102 years old.

By 1947, Dr. Terman had continually expanded his focus to include a broad view of the characteristics, successes, and failures of his cohort, including much explicit attention to vocational success, mental ...