In the population of highly intelligent individuals, there exists a major variation from the norm of inborn temperament, lying beyond the normally occurring variability. These individuals share a rather unbalanced temperament with those who are most vulnerable to major psychological disorders. When and if a major disorder develops, the individual’s preexisting skewed traits manifest as premorbid personality (traits manifested as a result of illness or injury). Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are three conditions which are most prevalent in vulnerable individuals. To varying degrees, these individuals are usually perceived to be characteristically less social, as well more self-absorbed and often aloof. They may exhibit remarkable “learned” affability and civility, however, they are inner-directed, autonomous, and deficient in empathy and connectedness on multiple levels. Individuals with this temperament often behave oddly and are perceived as fickle, idiosyncratic, peculiar, or strange. They are often dysphoric and tend to feel an inner void and a deep-seated sense of enduring loneliness. As assumed, this can progress to episodes of precipitous depression as these individuals are weighted by doubts and mood oscillations, and are often held captive by their compulsive rituals.
In “Social Anxiety, Emotional Intelligence, and Interpersonal Adjustment”, Laura Summerfeldt et al. examines the relationship between social anxiety and emotional intelligence (EI), and their shared impact upon interpersonal adjustment, through use of structural equation modeling with self-report data from a large nonclinical sample of nearly three-thousand individuals. The study found that EI was highly related to social interaction anxiety but not performance anxiety. A model permitting these three predictors to intercorrelate indicated that the EI factor was the dominant predictor of interpersonal adjustment–substantially reducing the unique contribution made by interaction anxiety. As such, this pattern reflected the principal