If you experience the world at higher voltage than the people around you, more sensation, more emotion, more ideas arriving at once, the research has a name dispute about what that is. One camp says the intensity described in gifted education as overexcitability is, when measured carefully, the established personality trait openness to experience wearing a different name. The other camp says the two are not the same, and that collapsing them loses something real.
This is a literal printed exchange: a study, a critique, and a reply, each in a peer-reviewed journal.
Vuyk, Krieshok and Kerr measured overexcitabilities against the matching facets of openness to experience in 461 people and found the overlap so high they called keeping both names a jangle fallacy: two labels for one underlying construct. Their conclusion was that the field should adopt openness and the five-factor model, which carries decades of empirical support. When critiqued, Vuyk and Kerr answered in print and held the position.
Vuyk, Krieshok & Kerr (2016), Gifted Child Quarterly, 60(3) · Vuyk & Kerr (2021), Roeper Review, 43(2)
Grant answered directly: the study claimed more than it showed, and its own data indicate the constructs are less similar than they appear in the literature's descriptions. On this side, overexcitability sits inside a developmental theory with claims openness does not make, and a field should not drop a construct on the strength of one overlap study. The reply drew a counter-reply, and the exchange stands unresolved.
Grant (2021), Roeper Review, 43(2)
This debate shares its central argument with the high sensitivity question: both turn on whether openness already covers the experience. Read that debate.
Both sides of this debate accept your experience as real. The exhaustion, the intensity, the doubt: no paper on either side disputes that these happen. What the sides contest is the frame. Which name the experience carries, which cause it points to, and whether the thing that needs to change is you or the environment around you.
And the debate does not settle in the abstract. Decades in, it remains open because it can only resolve in the particulars of an individual case: this person, this history, this room.
Last updated 2026-07-27