THRIVING OR WITHDRAWING? PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING OF ADOLESCENTS ACROSS ABILITY LEVELS IN CULTURALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS

Adolescents’ mental health is shaped by a mosaic of individual abilities and cultural norms. This study examines how high academic ability (giftedness) and cultural context jointly influence psychological well-being in adolescence. We compare gifted and non-gifted students across two educational settings to examine whether gifted youth thrive or exhibit socioemotional withdrawal under different cultural conditions. Key findings indicate that intellectually gifted students are not inherently prone to poorer mental health; in our Kazakhstani sample, high-ability students reported levels of emotional difficulties comparable to their peers, mirroring trends observed in Western research. However, pronounced cultural differences emerged in how distress is expressed: Kazakhstani adolescents rarely verbalized feeling “depressed,” often citing fatigue or somatic complaints, whereas U.S. youth more openly labeled their emotional state. These patterns align with cultural norms favoring emotional restraint in Asian contexts. Psychological and pedagogical support plays a pivotal role – in settings that offered empathic guidance and social-emotional learning opportunities, both gifted and non-gifted students showed more positive adjustment. The findings bridge educational psychology and cross-cultural psychiatry by highlighting that gifted adolescents’ well-being depends less on ability per se and more on cultural context and support systems. We discuss implications for schools: culturally sensitive counseling, teacher training to recognize masked distress, and programs to foster emotional resilience in high-ability youth. Our study underscores that with the right support, gifted students can thrive anywhere; without it, they may silently withdraw behind a veneer of high performance.