6.4-6.5 Temperament & Development
What is Temperament?
Temperament refers to early-appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation.
Reactivity: Quickness and intensity of emotional arousal, attention, and motor activity.
Self-regulation: Strategies that modify reactivity.
These psychological traits are believed to form the cornerstone of adult personality.
Temperament's Impact and Malleability
The New York Longitudinal Study (initiated in 1956 by Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess) followed 141 children from infancy into adulthood.
Findings:
Temperament can increase a child’s chances of experiencing psychological problems or protect from negative effects of a stressful home life.
Parenting practices can considerably modify children’s temperaments.
This research stimulated further study on temperament's stability, biological roots, and interaction with child-rearing experiences.
How is Temperament Measured? The Structure of Temperament
3.1. Thomas and Chess's Model of Temperament
This model was based on detailed descriptions of infants’ and children’s behavior from parent interviews, rated on nine dimensions.
Certain characteristics clustered together, yielding three types of children:
The easy child ( percent of the sample):
Quickly establishes regular routines in infancy.
Generally cheerful.
Adapts easily to new experiences.
The difficult child ( percent of the sample):
Irregular in daily routines.
Slow to accept new experiences.
Tends to react negatively and intensely.
Places children at high risk for adjustment problems (anxious withdrawal, aggressive behavior in early and middle childhood).
The label has been criticized due to varying judgments across caregivers and cultures.
The slow-to-warm-up child ( percent of the sample):
Inactive.
Shows mild, low-key reactions to environmental stimuli.
Is negative in mood.
Adjusts slowly to new experiences.
Presents fewer problems in early years but may show excessive fearfulness and constricted behavior in late preschool and school years.
Note that percent of the children did not fit any of these categories, showing unique blends of temperamental characteristics.
3.2. Mary Rothbart's Model of Temperament
This is the most influential contemporary model, providing a concise list of six dimensions.
It combines related traits from Thomas and Chess and other researchers.
Example: Distractibility and persistence are combined into “attention span/persistence.”
Unique Features:
Includes both “fearful distress” (reactivity to fear) and “irritable distress” (reactivity to frustration).
Deletes overly broad dimensions like regularity of body functions and intensity of reaction (e.g., regularity in one area doesn't predict it in another; intense positive affect doesn't mean intense negative affect).
Rothbart’s dimensions represent the three underlying components of temperament:
Emotion: “fearful distress,” “irritable distress,” “positive affect.”
Attention: “attention span/persistence.”
Action: “activity level.”
3.3. Measuring Temperament
Temperament is often assessed using various methods to gain comprehensive insights.
Parental Reports:
Method: Interviews or questionnaires given to parents.
Advantages:
Convenient and leverages parents’ extensive knowledge of their child across many situations.
Useful for understanding how parents perceive and respond to their child.
Limitations:
Can be criticized for potential bias due to subjectivity.
However, parental reports show moderate correlation with researchers’ observations of children’s behavior.
Behavior Ratings:
Method: Ratings by pediatricians, teachers, and other individuals familiar with the child.
Laboratory Observations:
Method: Direct observations by researchers in controlled laboratory settings.
Advantages:
Avoids the potential subjectivity of parental reports.
Allows researchers to better control children’s experiences.
Facilitates the combination of behavioral observations with neurobiological measures to understand biological bases of temperament.
Limitations:
Can lead to inaccuracies; for instance, capturing rare but important events (like responses to frustration) in homes is difficult.
In unfamiliar lab settings, fearful children might become too upset to complete tasks, even if they calmly avoid such experiences at home.
Neurobiological Measures:
Primarily focuses on children at opposite extremes of temperament: inhibited (shy) and uninhibited (sociable) children.
Inhibited (shy) children: React negatively to and withdraw from novel stimuli.
Uninhibited (sociable) children: Display positive emotion towards and approach novel stimuli.
Evidence: Biologically based reactivity, measured through heart rate, hormone levels, and brain activity, differentiates children with inhibited and uninhibited temperaments.
Stability of Temperament
Young children tend to show similar responses on dimensions like attention span, irritability, sociability, shyness, or effortful control when assessed over several months to years, sometimes extending into adulthood.
Overall Stability of Temperament:
Low in infancy and toddlerhood.
Only moderate from the preschool years onward.
Reasons for less stability:
Temperament itself develops with age.
Irritability: Many infants who initially seemed irritable become calm and content as they better regulate their attention and emotions.
Activity Level:
Early months: Active, wriggling infants tend to be highly aroused and uncomfortable; inactive babies are often alert and attentive.
Once infants move on their own: The reverse is true; an active crawler is usually alert and interested in exploration, while an inactive baby may be fearful and withdrawn.
Long-term prediction from early temperament is best achieved after age , when children’s styles of responding are better established.
Between age and , children show substantial and consistent improvement in tasks requiring effortful control, such as:
Waiting for a reward.
Lowering their voice to a whisper.
Succeeding at games like “Simon Says.”
Selectively attending to one stimulus while ignoring competing stimuli.
Researchers believe this improvement is due to the rapid development of areas in the prefrontal cortex involved in suppressing impulses around this age.
The ease with which children manage their reactivity in early childhood depends on the type and strength of the reactive emotion involved.
Fearful toddlers generally show greater improvement in effortful control by the preschool years compared to angry, irritable toddlers.
Role of Child-rearing:
Young children with fearful or irritable temperaments who experience patient, supportive parenting gain most in their capacity to manage emotions.
Emotionally negative children exposed to insensitive or unresponsive parenting are especially likely to score low in effortful control, increasing their risk for adjustment problems.
Conclusion on Stability:
Many factors influence a child’s temperament stability, including the development of biological systems, the child’s capacity for effortful control, and the quality and intensity of their emotional reactivity.
The low to moderate stability of temperament confirms that child-rearing can considerably modify biologically based temperamental traits.
Children with certain traits, such as negative emotionality, are especially susceptible to the influence of parenting.
Effortful Control: A Self-Regulatory Dimension
Beyond reactivity, individuals differ in effortful control, a self-regulatory dimension of temperament.
Definition: The capacity to voluntarily suppress a dominant response to plan and execute a more adaptive response.
Manifestations: Evident in how effectively a child can focus and shift attention, inhibit impulses, and manage negative emotion.
Predictive Power: Capacity for effortful control in early childhood predicts favorable development and adjustment across diverse cultures.
Positive Outcomes:
Persistence.
Task mastery.
Academic achievement.
Cooperation.
Moral maturity (concern about wrongdoing, willingness to apologize).
Prosocial behaviors (cooperation, sharing, helpfulness).
Also associated with children's resistance to stress, as they can shift attention away from disturbing events and anxiety.
Effortful control resembles the concept of executive function, indicating that similar mental activities lead to effective regulation in both cognitive and emotional/social domains.
Roles of Heredity and Environment in Temperament (Goodness-of-Fit Model)
The word temperament implies a genetic foundation for individual differences in personality.
Identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins across a wide range of temperamental and personality traits (Caspi & Shiner, 2006; Krueger & Johnson, 2008; Roisman & Fraley, 2006).
Heritability estimates from twin studies suggest a moderate role for genetic factors in temperament and personality: About half of individual differences are attributed to genetic makeup.
While genetic influences are clear, environment is also powerful.
Children exposed to severe malnutrition in infancy remain more distractible and fearful than their agemates, even after dietary improvement.
Infants reared in deprived orphanages are easily overwhelmed by stressful events, leading to poor emotion regulation, inattention, and weak impulse control (e.g., frequent anger expressions).
Heredity and environment often jointly contribute to temperament, as a child’s approach to the world can be intensified or lessened by experience through gene–environment correlations.
Ethnic and Gender Differences:
Compared with European-American infants, Chinese and Japanese babies tend to be less active, irritable, vocal, more easily soothed, and better at quieting themselves (Kagan, 2013d; Lewis, Ramsay, & Kawakami, 1993).
East Asian babies are also more attentive, less distractible, and as 2-year-olds, more compliant, cooperative, and higher in effortful control (e.g., able to wait longer for a toy) (Chen et al., 2003; Gartstein et al., 2006).
At the same time, Chinese and Japanese babies are more fearful, staying closer to mothers and showing more anxiety with strangers (Chen, Wang, & DeSouza, 2006).
These variations may have genetic roots, but are supported by cultural beliefs and practices:
Japanese mothers believe babies must learn to rely on parents through close physical contact, using gentle, soothing, gestural interactions.
European-American mothers believe in weaning babies toward autonomy, using a more active, stimulating, verbal approach (Kagan, 2010).
Chinese and Japanese adults discourage strong emotional expression, contributing to infant tranquility.
Gender differences are evident in infancy, suggesting a genetic foundation:
Boys tend to be more active, daring, less fearful, more irritable when frustrated, more likely to express high-intensity pleasure, and more impulsive than girls (contributing to higher injury rates).
Girls show a larger advantage in effortful control, contributing to greater compliance, cooperativeness, better school performance, and lower incidence of behavior problems (Else-Quest, 2012; Olino et al., 2013).
Parents encourage sons to be physically active and daughters to seek help/physical closeness, leading to wider gender differences in some temperamental traits by adolescence (Bryan & Dix, 2009; Hines, 2015).
Differential Susceptibility to Rearing Experiences:
Emotionally reactive toddlers function worse with inept parenting but benefit most from good parenting.
Molecular genetic analyses clarify gene–environment interactions:
Young children with a chromosome 7 gene (short 5-HTTLPR), which interferes with serotonin function and increases risk of self-regulation difficulties, show high susceptibility to parenting quality.
With maladaptive parenting, these children show externalizing problems; but with kind, supportive parenting, they fare exceedingly well in adjustment (Kochanska et al., 2011; van IJzendoorn, Belsky, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012).
For children without the 5-HTTLPR genotype, parenting quality has minimal impact on externalizing symptoms.
A two-year follow-up of 1-year-olds from poverty-stricken families illustrated this:
Toddlers with the high-risk 5-HTTLPR genotype exposed to inept parenting became increasingly reactive (distress, anger, screaming) to hostile maternal behavior. Their negative emotionality predicted a sharp rise in aggression and defiance by age .
In contrast, high-risk toddlers of affectionate, encouraging mothers displayed effective emotion regulation and far less anger/aggression than children with a low-risk genotype. Low-risk children barely reacted to parenting variations (Davies & Cicchetti, 2014).
Children with the short 5-HTTLPR genetic marker show unusually high early plasticity, making their emotion regulation particularly susceptible to both good and poor parenting. They benefit most from interventions reducing parental stress and promoting responsive child-rearing.
Siblings’ Unique Experiences:
Parents often describe siblings' personalities as more distinct than other observers do, focusing on differences (e.g., “She’s a lot more active,” “He’s more sociable”).
In a study of 1- to 3-year-old twin pairs, parents rated identical twins as less alike in temperament than researchers did, and viewed fraternal twins as somewhat opposite, whereas researchers rated them as moderately similar (Saudino, 2003).
This emphasis on unique qualities affects parenting practices, and each child evokes consistent responses from caregivers.
Siblings also have distinct experiences with teachers, peers, and others that affect personality development.
Both identical and fraternal twins tend to become increasingly dissimilar in personality with age (Loehlin & Martin, 2001).
In sum, temperament and personality are understood through complex interdependencies between genetic and environmental factors.
While the lesson introduces the idea of heredity and environment, it does not explicitly detail the goodness-of-fit model, which describes how effective child-rearing practices involve creating child-rearing environments that recognize each child’s temperament while encouraging more adaptive functioning.
Temperament and Child Rearing: The Goodness-of-Fit Model
Thomas and Chess (1977) proposed the goodness-of-fit model to explain how temperament and environment jointly produce favorable outcomes.
Definition of Goodness of Fit: Involves creating child-rearing environments that recognize each child’s temperament while simultaneously encouraging more adaptive functioning.
Adults' Role in Goodness of Fit:
If a child’s disposition interferes with learning or social interactions, adults must gently but consistently counteract the child’s maladaptive style.
Impact on Difficult Children:
Difficult children (those who withdraw from new experiences and react negatively intensely) frequently experience parenting that poorly fits their dispositions.
As infants: Less likely to receive sensitive caregiving.
By the second year: Parents may resort to angry, punitive discipline, which undermines development of effortful control.
Cycle of maladaptation: As the child becomes defiant, parents become stressed, continuing coercive tactics and inconsistent discipline (sometimes rewarding noncompliance by giving in) (Lee et al., 2012; Paulussen-Hoogeboom et al., 2007; Pesonen et al., 2008).
This cycle sustains and can increase the child’s irritable, conflict-ridden style.
Positive Parenting Effects:
When parents are positive and sensitive, helping infants and toddlers (especially those who are emotionally reactive) regulate emotion, “difficultness” declines by age or (Raikes et al., 2007).
In toddlerhood and childhood, parental sensitivity, support, clear expectations, and limits foster effortful control, reducing the likelihood of difficultness persisting and leading to emotional and social difficulties (Cipriano & Stifter, 2010; Raikes et al., 2007).
Cultural Values and Goodness of Fit:
Cultural values affect the fit between parenting and child temperament, as seen in China.
Historical Context (1990): High valuing of social harmony discouraged self-assertion, leading Chinese adults to evaluate shy children positively.
Shyness was positively correlated with teacher-rated competence, peer acceptance, leadership, and academic achievement (Chen et al., 2005).
Modern Context (2002): Rapid expansion of a market economy, requiring assertiveness and sociability, changed attitudes toward childhood shyness.
These positive relationships weakened in 1998 and reversed by 2002, mirroring Western research findings (Chen, Wang, & DeSouza, 2006; Yu, 2002; Chen et al., 2005).
Rural vs. Urban Differences: Positive valuing of shyness persists in rural Chinese areas, where shy children continue to enjoy high social status and are well-adjusted (Chen, Wang, & Cao, 2011).
Conclusion: Cultural context significantly influences whether shy children thrive or struggle.
Importance of Early Intervention:
An effective match between rearing conditions and child temperament is best achieved early, before unfavorable temperament–environment relationships lead to maladjustment.
Key Takeaways from Goodness-of-Fit Model:
Children have unique dispositions that adults must accept.
Parents are neither solely responsible for their children’s virtues nor solely to blame for their faults.
Parents can transform an environment that exacerbates a child’s problems into one that builds on their strengths.
Goodness of fit is also central to infant–caregiver attachment, where the emotional styles of both partners contribute to their first intimate relationship.