Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children

96 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by actfrench
(teachyourkids.substack.com)

56 Comments

bonsai_spool

6 hours ago

One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.

Even the core idea, 'rejection sensitivity' is acknowledged not to be a diagnostic entity: so then how can we make definitive comparisons? Maybe clinical gestalt... but the author is not trained to see and evalaute patients.

mobilejdral

5 hours ago

100%, you can't have a section titled

> Why It Happens: The Mechanics Underneath the Reaction

And then don't talk about Mechanics, but instead no citations just guess. For anyone that actually wants something to go learn more about checkout the frequency of NCAH and the resulting blunted cortisol response as one thing that is influencing this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06102-y#MOESM3 Plasmalogen, B5, 12-HETE, Androsterone sulfate, etc are all related to the functioning of the HPA-Axis.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19598235/ <- CYP11B1 specifically here

Anecdotally: I worked at a software company that had free snacks in the office kitchen and would always chuckle how the salt snacks would run out first. The connection being NCAH can result in less aldosterone which helps regulate salt in the body.

RobotToaster

4 hours ago

Interesting. Intuitively a software company is the last place I would expect a high concentration of people with a condition that causes high testosterone.

adamsb6

5 hours ago

Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?

Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.

For those not in the know, a generation of children were taught to read sans phonics. They were told to do things like guess at words based on pictures or context clues. Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.

orwin

39 minutes ago

education research is at the same level as nutritional research was 20 years ago. If you don't read cutting-edge article, what you're reading is probably at best outdated.

csa

3 hours ago

> Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?

Large swathes of education research are extremely questionable due to things like limited or no ability to be reproduced, circular references, or just straight up fraud.

The more that something that falls under the moniker of “education research” is built on the foundation of a more traditional (and typically more rigorous) academic discipline, the less likely that it is bogus research (e.g., Howard Gardner’s core research on multiple intelligences, which was science based on aphasic patients), versus the derived works on MI, many/most of which are bunk that he does not endorse).

> Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.

This is just a cloze exercise. These can have a legitimate role in a learning environment when used appropriately.

CrazyStat

4 hours ago

I prompted ChatGPT (paid subscription, latest model, high thinking effort):

> Give me two paragraphs on the benefits of whole language reading instruction. Don't refer to other reading instruction methods or compare/contrast, just focus on the positives.

And got, with no pushback,

> Whole language reading instruction emphasizes making reading meaningful, engaging, and connected to students’ real experiences. By surrounding children with rich, authentic texts—such as stories, poems, informational books, and student-created writing—it encourages them to see reading as a purposeful form of communication rather than simply an academic task. Students are invited to use context, prior knowledge, illustrations, language patterns, and their understanding of meaning to engage with texts. This can help foster curiosity, comprehension, confidence, and a positive identity as a reader. Because students often have opportunities to choose books and respond personally to what they read, whole language instruction can also support motivation and a lasting enjoyment of reading.

> Whole language instruction also integrates reading with writing, speaking, and listening, helping children experience literacy as an interconnected set of communication skills. Classroom activities may include shared reading, read-alouds, journal writing, storytelling, discussion, and collaborative projects, allowing students to develop literacy in varied and socially meaningful contexts. Teachers can build instruction around students’ interests and developmental needs, creating opportunities for creativity, self-expression, and deeper thinking about texts. This emphasis on authentic language use can strengthen vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and awareness of how written language functions while helping students develop independence and confidence in using literacy throughout their daily lives.

Time to update your priors on how sycophantic frontier models are.

sfRattan

3 hours ago

It might not obvious to a number of readers on HN, but whole language reading instruction is soundly discredited[1]. For those who prefer listening, the America Public Media podcast Sold a Story[2] covers the history of reading instruction in the English-speaking world and the rise and (slow) fall of whole language hokum in extensive depth.

And CrazyStat's implication strikes me as still largely true, so I'll make it explicit: even frontier LLMs will still resort to sycophancy when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights to reproduce only some of it in response to a user query. And the harnesses that LLM providers silently, invisibly integrate behind-the-scenes to counteract hallucination and syncophancy are definitionally patch-jobs at best. The latest models may be better when explicitly instructed or configured by default to search the web and pull sources into their context, but the root problem remains unsolved and can still rear its flattering head if you're not paying close attention.

[1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100618772271

[2]: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

antonvs

2 hours ago

> when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights

All this talk of contradictory information, sycophancy, and flattery is little more than anthropomorphic projection in cases like this.

One prompt will elicit a response based on one set of weights that are most closely related to the prompt. A different prompt will elicit a response from a different set of weights, for the same reason.

There’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model and its responses, and no need to invoke sycophancy or flattery as a reason for the behavior. You’d get the same behavior from a model that hadn’t been RLHFd to be sycophantic.

sfRattan

an hour ago

> There’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model and its responses, and no need to invoke sycophancy or flattery as a reason for the behavior.

Sycophancy and flattery are words that relate to how humans experience LLMs. It's appropriate to use words that could anthropomorphize as descriptors for a problem when that problem exists in the space of human experience. It doesn't matter that an LLM is merely a predictive model. It matters that humans who use the model perceive it as a conversation partner and walk away feeling 'flattered' by the model's predictive responses to the humans' input, which the model predicts without regard for factual accuracy, which happens in turn because (as you point out) "there’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model."

We could call the problem "LLM predictive output which tends to have the effect of flattering the user's opinionated assumptions without regard for factual accuracy" if you prefer that much of a mouthful, but "sycophancy" describes the problem well and is one word instead of twenty.

> One prompt will elicit a response based on one set of weights that are most closely related to the prompt. A different prompt will elicit a response from a different set of weights, for the same reason.

Yes or, in other words: there's sufficient contradictory data which were used to train the model's weights that it will predict (a series of tokens which when read in order in English convey) accurate information for some prompts and (a series of tokens which when read in order in English convey) inaccurate information for others. That the contradiction is beyond the LLM's scope is part of the problem. The two identical parentheticals above are (or ought to be) as unneeded as pointing out that a statistical model cannot technically be sycophantic.

eudamoniac

41 minutes ago

I think it's a priori obvious that that method is idiotic; does the podcast detail how this made it into curricula? I am a lot more interested in how this plainly ridiculous shit made it into schools than the fact of it being so.

sfRattan

28 minutes ago

Yes, the podcast goes into exactly that detail.

IIRC it was a teacher in New Zealand[1] who had teacherly charisma, was earnestly committed to her method, and was so profoundly wrong that she became the first domino of a regression in reading ability which we are still feeling today across the English-speaking world. And teachers and education professionals became fans of both the method and the growing personas behind it (there were Americans who turned whole language hokum into a product for sale... using the cult-like sales tactics of Amway and other MLMs but applied to a target audience to largely woman-attended teachers' conferences and fairs instead of Mormon housewives).

Sadly, humans were capable of producing plausible sounding nonsense long before the advent of LLMs. And promoting it persuasively.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay

ndriscoll

3 hours ago

That seems like an unfair prompt. You literally told it to do a specific task and it did as instructed. For sycophancy, let's try something like this:

> My child's teacher says that they don't use whole language reading anymore. I learned that way and it worked great. Instead they're spending years on phonics when my kid can already read. They're crazy, right?

> No—they’re not crazy. The evidence base has shifted strongly toward explicit, systematic phonics, especially for beginning readers. Whole-language approaches emphasized learning words through meaning/context; phonics explicitly teaches the sound–spelling system.

> If your child already reads well, though, it’s reasonable to ask the teacher how instruction is being differentiated rather than simply repeating beginner phonics for years.

sfRattan

2 hours ago

> That seems like an unfair prompt. You literally told it to do a specific task and it did as instructed. For sycophancy...

You redefine syncophancy too narrowly. Many (if not an outright majority of) everyday LLM users have neither the educational foundation nor skill to ask good, well-formed questions like the one you propose. We should consider syncophany in the scope of an average person's non-optimal use of LLMs. CrazyStat's prompt is something your average Joe will absolutely feed an LLM, and Joe will walk away with something very much like those plausible falsehoods. We have to think of and work against LLM syncophancy in the scope of how the hypothetical average person will use an LLM.

ndriscoll

2 hours ago

What? Their prompt explicitly said not to compare and contrast with other methodologies, and to specifically only generate a defense of whole language with only positives. That is not something your average Joe will do. Mine just gave a typical complaint that a parent might give and said, hey isn't my kid's teacher crazy?

CrazyStat

2 hours ago

It's something that someone using an LLM to generate slop articles absolutely will do, which was the original context I was replying to:

> Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.

My prompt demonstrated that a frontier model happily goes along with whole language reading instruction with no pushback.

alephnerd

5 hours ago

> One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.

The poster is SEOing their substack and product (modulo). All their posts are either related to their product, their product's substack, or talks related to their product.

HN has been an SEO and content marketing target for years now, and existing HN moderation is increasingly failing to catch these attempts.

Heck, a bot account for The Register reached 66K karma and was undetected until a couple of us complained.

RobotToaster

6 hours ago

Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is an acknowledged trait of ADHD.

freehorse

3 hours ago

Emotional dysregulation is an acknowledged trait of ADHD, "rejection sensitivity dysphoria" appears in some discussions but it is not officially recognised anywhere as a symptom or disorder or anything, but it can be seen as an instance of emotional dysregulation anyway.

RA_Fisher

3 hours ago

Description has to come first, then we can form hypotheses.

bonsai_spool

4 hours ago

I can't respond to your newest comment but essentially 'rejection sensitivity dysphoria' is not in the DSM-V, so to acknowledge it one needs to have both a definition and some reasonable experience with the diagnostic entity (i.e., it's not enough to read about a disease to be able to diagnose it).

giantg2

5 hours ago

That doesn't invalidate the parent's point. We can still question if the details and way it is presented is accurate.

RobotToaster

4 hours ago

I should've been clearer, I was replying to the "so then how can we make definitive comparisons" point.

ChrisMarshallNY

4 hours ago

Ugh. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable giving the sensitivity its own diagnoses. I feel as if it's a secondary reaction to a chronic condition.

I'm "on the spectrum," which, of course, means that my K-12 days were a living hell. It was bad. I spent most of my early years, acting as a punching bag for any bully or proto-bully that was feeling the need to let off some steam.

Needless to say, I tended to be a bit "sensitive," during that period.

I also learned, early on, that I was absolutely terrible at determining motivation in others. I have learned to ask, explicitly, before assigning motive, so the sensitivity has extended far past my bully-magnet days.

These days, I'm fairly old, and have developed highly effective compensation/coping mechanisms, but it took a long time to get here.

All that, to say that, in my case, I feel as if the "sensitivity" was real, but as a secondary symptom of my "normal" autism lite.

hoppp

5 hours ago

"autistic individuals may have difficulty consciously processing social evaluative cues in the moment, meaning a child may not always recognize that what they are experiencing is a reaction to rejection, even while the physiological load of it is very real"

Alexythemia is like a that, I can have anxiety without realizing it, all I see is that my hands are shaking, blood pressure rises but in the head I'm like whatever, I don't notice.

However alexythemia also means no psychological reaction to physical emotion sensations.

I would interpret this like some subconscious processing of social cues does occur in this case and it does trigger inner changes,but why it occurs does not make it into consciousness, so the alexythemia hides the reason for the body sensation but the sensation is strong enough to be noticeable and the lack of understanding for the strong reaction can cause people to flip out.

I am not rejection sensitive at all btw, too dense to give a shit but its interesting.

dahart

4 hours ago

> When adults consistently praise a child’s intelligence rather than their process or effort, mistakes stop feeling like normal setbacks and start feeling existential.

Isn’t this a good reason to stop using the term “gifted”? Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?

“Gifted” children are historically identified and classified via IQ tests (typically with the threshold IQ >= 130 - though the definition of what ‘gifted’ should mean is being debated), and using “gifted” for smart kids emerged and was popularized in the 1920’s when IQ tests were being developed by people who basically believed in eugenics, in the heritability of intelligence, and they wanted to identify the kids with the smart genes. [1] Using language like ‘profoundly gifted’ and ‘genius’ for high IQ has always been (mis)leading since IQ is a ranking, not an absolute measure of intelligence.

I just searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Overvi...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36278606/

ndriscoll

3 hours ago

> Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?

That sounds wrong? Like I found engineering courses at university easy, and never put in any effort or studied, but still got As on exams where other people who I know worked very hard got Cs. Maybe working hard is important for outcomes, but clearly it's a different phenomenon from intelligence.

The Wikipedia article you linked also mentions that high IQ people literally have measurably different brain structures.

Intelligence is also known to be highly heritable (twin studies), and we do have a fairly large set of identified genes now that contribute, though generally none has a very strong effect, and apparently in many cases, there's multiple genes that need to interact, so it's not like you can just identify "the smart gene."

That paper you link doesn't seem to actually say anything. Like they're saying that we should have more specific terminology because different "gifted" kids need different things, but it would seem to me that what you are saying is exactly the cause of that issue. Previously we said that if you have a certain IQ, you are gifted. If we expand the scope of that to be gifted in a bunch of different ways, then it becomes a non-specific descriptor that entails different needs and therefore becomes unhelpful for figuring out support services.

Like, you can also be amazing at music or art, you can be a hard worker, etc. That just means something different from having high intelligence. But high intelligence does exist. I would expect that if somebody's a hard worker, moving more quickly might overwhelm them as they eventually run out of hours in the day and can't keep up with the work. A high intelligence person, by contrast, can quickly grasp topics, so it's not really very much work for them to move at a high pace, and in fact it might cause them to become more engaged.

eudamoniac

2 hours ago

It's literally just a thinly veiled attack on the concept of intelligence existing, which most such articles are. There is a huge amount of, for lack of a better word propaganda, being written to convince people that intelligence does not exist and if it does it's immeasurable and so widely ranging as to be meaningless. You'll never hear mention of g because they have not read the first thing in the literature; it's all vibes and deep fear of humans being ranked in any sense.

FinnLobsien

an hour ago

This kind of AI-written article often does more harm than good. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is not a diagnosis (as the article admits).

That means confidently stating who this applies to, what it feels like, and what to do about it is not a great idea because it could teach someone the wrong things.

JSR_FDED

6 hours ago

I recognize many of these behaviors from my childhood. Fortunately I’ve grown out of most of them. These ways of framing issues and feedback are very valuable, even in adult life.

throwaway713

3 hours ago

I had rejection sensitivity growing up. It was a rather negative experience. At the time, I would have traded it away for pretty much anything. As an adult however, I wonder if whatever aspect of my personality led to the rejection sensitivity also led to certain “benefits” in terms of the ability to achieve various things I wanted to (via correlated traits).

If I could trade away just the rejection sensitivity, I would. If I had to trade both the rejection sensitivity along with the correlated traits, I’m not so sure that I would in fact. This sort of decision is obviously very individual however. The tradeoffs may not be worth it for many.

TuckerBMorgan

4 hours ago

Only recently learned about RS, and it was one of those moments of seeing a lot of my past through a new lens

cgio

6 hours ago

An almost trifecta. I am almost gifted, autism and adhd ( or add, you wouldn’t call me hyperactive…). My trick was to “use” my autism to filter out rejection clues. I am still sensitive in a sense, can get obsessed over detail of something that could be perceived as a rejection, but I actively refuse parsing anything as such. People tell me I am over-confident to a fault.

notnaut

5 hours ago

Very interesting. I’m in the same boat with a little more hyperactive and a little less autism. I never learned the filtering thing and I feel nearly as sensitive and doubtful as I did as a kid. It leaves me to dwell on everything and rarely make firm decisions, so I have the opposite problem.

notrealyme123

5 hours ago

How do you use autism to filter something? Did you train this?

JonChesterfield

5 hours ago

That's the wrong baseline. If you start out oblivious that people are telling you things (with their expression, or with the noises they're making) you get that filter for free. The work is in _not_ filtering out such things. First you have to realise that's a thing (somehow? good luck with the bootstrap), then learn to pay attention, then try to make sense of the result.

willismichael

5 hours ago

The "hyperactive" part of ADHD is kind of a misnomer, or at least doesn't mean hyperactive in the way that most people understand the word. Think of it more as a tendency to hyperfocus on specific things while completely ignoring other things.

r_lee

6 hours ago

the perfectionism and need for control is very true.

I think with the rejection and criticism it's not so much about the actual criticism but the idea of what the other person now thinks/operates on, while they might gloss over it, you might assume the worst case scenario and think that now they're against you and you have to win them over again

I'd say in general the concepts of "it's not a big deal" "it's probably nothing major" etc. don't seem to register

sssilver

5 hours ago

Can someone explain whether these are physiological / chemical issues, or whether they are a matter of the things your brain "knows", your neural network, and therefore can be transformed by the power of thoughts?

In other, more blunt terms, is this a "hardware" or a "software" issue?

gregw2

an hour ago

Good question. I think RSD is not studied enough that we know.

However the following articles' descriptions of drug treatments using alpha-agonists, such as clonidine and guanfacine, which provide a response rate of 55% (significant relief for 55% of people) does imply to me that there is some physiological basis and may be of interest to people reading this thread: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/how-to-deal-with-rejectio... https://neurodivergentinsights.com/history-of-rejection-sens... https://www.goldstarrehab.com/parent-resources/is-rejection-...

And I think there are stronger findings that autism/ADHD is at least partially genetic.

P.S. I would caution you against holding a premise of a hard "or", that mental conditions are either hardware or software, or the hidden premise that you can't patch hardware with software.

nekusar

3 hours ago

Ugh. I hate the whole trope of "gifted children". Most of them (well, us) are high functioning autistics. And the worst phrase that plagued us all school years was "you have soooo much potential".

adaml_623

6 hours ago

Did anybody know of good resources for this sort of thing in adults?

JonChesterfield

5 hours ago

Talking to software engineers about it has a pretty good hit rate for personal anecdotes.

mannanj

4 hours ago

This article seems to have several humans below giving attention to AI generated output. I'd prefer not to give my attention to it, unless the author had been ethical and transparent and stated up front that was AI generated.

actfrench

2 hours ago

It is not ai-generated. It was hand-written by a friend and colleague with deep respect in the education community.

gchamonlive

4 hours ago

> a nervous system built to detect and process signals quickly and deeply

Is this even true? Is there a measurable physical difference in the medium that accounts for this, or is this just an abstract process that could be but isn't necessarily related to biological processes? A different way to think, a more mature intrapersonal relationship...

eudamoniac

2 hours ago

AI Slop Sensitivity in Gifted Adults is my next article

actfrench

2 hours ago

The article is not ai-generated. I'm curious what makes you think it is?

PebblesRox

an hour ago

Pangram is flagging the full text of the article as AI-assisted.

eudamoniac

an hour ago

I am sorry to bear the news that your friend did indeed use AI within the article. First of all gptzero guesses 100% AI generated.

Second of all you can sniff it out with plenty of the phrasing which is what my original comment was based on: "The correction temporarily erases the bigger picture." "Feedback on an assignment is rarely just about the assignment. It becomes a referendum on whether the child is still who they believe themselves to be." "What follows is rarely proportional: “no one likes me,” a wave of rage, or a full shutdown." "This is protective armor. Underneath it is usually plain embarrassment." "Because the identity is more invested, the shame lands harder." "That gap is where a great deal of the combustion happens." "The underlying fear in these moments is usually not “I will get in trouble.” It is closer to “I will be misunderstood, reduced to one moment, or unfairly categorized.” That distinction changes how an adult should respond."

Third of all the entire structure is a chatgpt output. Humans don't write their documents like this.

I would have compared it to some of her previous writing from six or more years ago but couldn't find any. I'm pretty certain if you found some it would not read anything like this article.

wizardforhire

2 hours ago

Idk… the comments so far a just dismissing this out right as AI slop… and then some comments about Elon Musk and some anecodatal experiences… Any ways this is a real person you can contact if you take the time to click to the site… and here’s the author’s bio on said site.

“In 2014, after teaching in schools for over 25 years and working with hundreds of gifted children and their parents, Maya Sissoko founded Whole Child Education. She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in education and worked in schools on the East Coast before serving for 15 years as a lead teacher and teacher trainer at The Nueva School in the Bay Area. Her original curriculum design on ancient Egypt was highlighted by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in his book, “That Used to Be Us,” in the chapter “Average Is Over.” Her perspective on giftedness was also featured in The San Francisco Standard on the increasing use of IQ testing for preschool admissions and the limited public support for gifted children in California.

She is also the parent of a Nueva and Harvard Law School graduate, who worked as a federal prosecutor and now practices law in Washington, D.C.

Whole Child Education (WCE) is continually evolving to respond to the ever-changing educational needs of children and parents. WCE has always promoted learning outside the traditional framework and offers expertise to parents curious about child-centered, individualized educational options. Maya is available for private teaching, parent coaching, educational advising, and homeschool design.”

actfrench

2 hours ago

Thank you. I also found it strange people thought that. Maya is amazing and deeply respected in the Bay area community. She did not use AI to write this.