Temperament

What is temperament? #

Temperament is defined as the constitutionally-based individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation. See Temperament and Birth Order for the personality-psych treatment of the same construct, and Trait Theory for how temperament relates to adult personality.

• Biologically based and influenced by maturation, heredity, experience
• Consistent across situations
• Becomes more stable across time and development (adults are generally calmer than young children - rank order stability)
  • Temperament as a child is related to temperament as an adult
• Related to personality
  • More biologically based than personality, and detectable in early life

Temperament and behavior #

When individuals react to unfamiliar or unexpected events, two main categories of temperamental biases in infants (Kagan):

• inhibited response elicits restraint, caution, avoidance
• uninhibited response elicits spontaneous approach

Temperament and Psychopathology #

Direct relationships: extreme temperament = psychopathology Transactional relationships: temperament affects environment, which can influence other processes (similar to evocative gene-environment correlation) Indirect relationships: temperament affects psychological processes (like emotional regulation), which can develop into psychopathology

Measuring Temperament #

• questionnaire reports (parent, teacher, child)
• behavioral observations
• computerized measures

Two main approaches for studying individual differences:

• variable-centered approach: characterize temperament on different dimensions
• person-centered approach: group children into different categories based on temperament profiles
  • example: based on parent interviews, babies can be categorized as “easy”, “difficult”, “slow-to-warm-up”