Temperament and Birth Order

Derryberry & Reed 2002: can having high attentional control buffer (protect) highly anxious people from getting stuck on threat-related information?

• IV: trait anxiety
• DV: attentional bias
• Moderator: attentional control
• Finding/result: for an uncued trial, the highly anxious with low attentional control were much slower than those with low anxiety. There was no significant difference found in the other trials. This suggests that in cases where anxiety is high, attentional control does moderate attention.

Temperament: the nature part of personality: core aspects that are biologically defined (see 2-4 temperament for the developmental-psych treatment, including the same Kagan inhibited/uninhibited distinction).

• Inhibited vs uninhibited temperaments (emotionality) in infants is systematically definable and has predictive power.
  • 20% of infants were clearly inhibited, 40% were clearly uninhibited, and 20% are in between.
  • Predictive of adolescent and adult behavior, but only to a degree (due to moderating effect on environmental factors, parenting, etc). Inhibited children had a greater stress response when encountering novel stimuli.
  • Heritability is about .64 at 14 months, and .5 at 24 months
  • Biological basis of inhibition: inhibited => greater right sided brain activity
  • Greater amygdala activation
  • Can be changed: parenting intervention to decrease overprotection, and educate about anxiety

Attentional Systems #

Activation system/Approach (Behavioral Activation System):: what causes us to do things (visible at 6 months) Inhibition system/Avoidance (Behavioral Inhibition System): regulates the activation system, and discourages us from doing detrimental things (visible at 1 year) Vigilance system: focus attention on threat cues, highly visible in neurotic individuals Orienting system: disengage, move, engage, focus attention based on location or target stimulus Executive attentional system: voluntary executive functions (planning, decision making, overcoming habitual responses) that regulate involuntary systems

• Interference: habitual response is incorrect, so we need executive function to replace it with the correct response.

Stroop task: measure response time when color of word doesn’t match the meaning of the word (e.g. the word “yellow” is colored green)

• measures executive function and ability to inhibit habitual response

**** visible by 6 months of age,

Birth Order #

Sulloway hypothesis: siblings in different birth order positions differ in size, strength, and status within the family.

• Attentional competition: first-born children get all the attention, but later-born children share attention from birth
• Later-born children are more likely to be arrested more than once compared to firstborn
• Healey & Ellis: second-borns are higher on openness, while first-borns are higher on conscientiousness. Effect sizes were larger for female-female siblings compared to male-male (reproducible for both college and older populations)
• No differences in neuroticism (firstborns are anxious about status, and laterborns are more self-conscious)
• Firstborn children are lower in agreeableness

Niche partitioning: sibling competition for parental investment leads to diversification in sibling strategies (Darwin’s principle of divergence)

Moderators:

• Age gap between siblings: larger = less difference in personality
• Conflict with parents: overrides any birth order differences
• Functional birth order: mortality, adoption, marriage may affect chronological birth order