Prof. Márta Fülöp spoke about the significance of competitions in the life of gifted students.
Gifted and competition
The lecture discusses the significance of contests and competitions in the gifteds’ life from different aspects. It points to potential personality traits, competitive attitudes and patterns of coping with winning and losing that may help or hinder peak performance in contests. It also discusses if there are potential psychological and somatic health consequences of different competitive attitudes and competitive or non-competitive social environments for the gifted. It presents some details from a semi-structured interview study with highly accomplished gifted adults about their perception of the role of competition in their life and how gifted people who encountered adversity coped with it. All these different approaches highlight the interplay among high abilities, competitive traits, psychological and somatic health and becoming a high functioning gifted adult.
Prof. Márta Fülöp (DSc) is scientific advisor and head of the Social and Cultural Psychology Department of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre of Natural Sciences. Her main field of expertise is the psychology of competition and cross-cultural psychology. She is also professor of social psychology in the Institute of Psychology of Karoli Gaspar University, Budapest. She was research fellow of Japan Foundation (1996-1997), a Lindzey Fellow (1997-1998) in the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, USA, a visiting professor at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Psychology, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan (2004), and she has been a visiting professor in the University of International Business and Economy in Beijing, China since 2013. She has been invited to more than 25 countries to speak and/or teach about her research. She is president of the Children’s Identity and Citieznship: European Association, Secretary General of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) and Secretary of International Affairs of the Hungarian Psychological Association.