Having a high IQ: good or bad luck?

In a context of widespread rumours that children with a high IQ are at greater risk of school failure, neurodevelopmental and health disorders (Ramus & Gauvrit, 2017), we have conducted several studies testing those hypotheses, concluding that these rumours were unfounded (Guez et al., 2018; Peyre et al., 2016; Ramus, 2024; Shevchenko et al., 2023; Williams et al., 2023).

The present project will revisit this question in the Elfe birth cohort, in which about 10,000 French children have been followed until 10 years old, age at which they took an abbreviated IQ test. Their 4th grade teachers further answered whether each child had been identified as gifted or “high potential”. This will give us the opportunity to compare the characteristics of children identified as gifted (by teachers and other professionals) and those of objectively gifted children (based on the IQ test). The hypothesis is that, although high IQ is generally associated with positive outcomes, the fraction of high IQ children who are identified as such may be so because they have various associated problems (Lavrijsen & Verschueren, 2023).

References :

Guez, A., Peyre, H., Le Cam, M., Gauvrit, N., & Ramus, F. (2018). Are high-IQ students more at risk of school failure? Intelligence, 71, 32–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2018.09.003

Lavrijsen, J., & Verschueren, K. (2023). High Cognitive Ability and Mental Health: Findings from a Large Community Sample of Adolescents. Journal of Intelligence, 11(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11020038

Peyre, H., Ramus, F., Melchior, M., Forhan, A., Heude, B., & Gauvrit, N. (2016). Emotional, behavioral and social difficulties among high-IQ children during the preschool period: Results of the EDEN mother-child cohort. Personality and Individual Differences, 94, 366–371.

Ramus, F. (2024). La légende noire des surdoués, suite et fin. Enfance, 1(1), 11–20. https://doi.org/10.3917/enf2.241.0011

Ramus, F., & Gauvrit, N. (2017). La légende noire des surdoués. La Recherche, Mars 2017. https://ramus-meninges.fr/2017/02/03/la-pseudoscience-des-surdoues-2/

Shevchenko, V., Labouret, G., Guez, A., Côté, S., Heude, B., Peyre, H., & Ramus, F. (2023). Relations between intelligence index score discrepancies and psychopathology symptoms in the EDEN mother-child birth cohort. Intelligence, 98, 101753. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101753

Williams, C. M., Peyre, H., Labouret, G., Fassaya, J., Guzmán García, A., Gauvrit, N., & Ramus, F. (2023). High intelligence is not associated with a greater propensity for mental health disorders. European Psychiatry, 66(1), e3. https://doi.org/10.1192/j.eurpsy.2022.2343