Temperament Flashcards
Temperament
An individual’s emotional and behavioral characteristics that appear to be consistent across situations and to have some stability over time.
Chess and Thomas three broad temperament categories:
- Easy babies are playful, are regular in their biological functions and adapt easily to new circumstances. In infancy these children seemed to quickly establish regular sleeping and feeding schedules, were generally cheerful and adapted quickly to new routines, new food and new people. As they grew older they learned the rules of new games quickly, participated readily in new activities and adapted easily to school. This group was called the “easy children”, because they presented so few problems in care and training.
- Difficult babies are irregular in their biological functions, are irritable, and often respond intensely and negatively to new situations or try to withdraw from them. They were often irregular in feeding and sleeping, were slower to accept new foods, took a longer time to adjust to new routines or activities and tended to cry a great deal. Their crying and their laughter were rated as being characteristically loud. Frustrations usually seemed to send them into violent tantrums. These children were, of course, something of a trial to their parents and required a high degree of consistency and tolerance in their upbringing.
- Slow-to-warm-up babies are low in activity level, and their responses are typically mild. They tend to withdraw from new situations, but in a calm way, and require more time than easy babies to adapt to change.
Rothbart’s three dimensions of temperamental variation:
Effortful control -control over what one attends to and reacts to (attention control, inhibitory control, perceptual sensitivity, low-intensity pleasure). Children with high Effortful Control are able to modulate their behavior and inhibit the dominant, impulsive response. Thus, these children have the ability to use attentional control and other coping strategies to monitor and adjust their behavior. Effortful Control has been positively related to social competence and negatively related to externalizing behavior and anger among preschoolers.
Negative affect-the extent of negative emotions (frustration, fear, discomfort, sadness, soothability). Negative Affectivity is thought to be a marker of emotional dysregulation that predisposes children to externalizing behavior problems. Children with high Negative Affectivity become easily frustrated, which can lead to a pattern of anger, irritability, or aggression.
Surgency/Extraversion-the extent to which one engages eagerly and happily with people and activities. (activity,
low-shyness, high-intensity pleasure, smiling and laughter, impulsivity, positive anticipation). Children with moderate levels of Surgency/Extraversion could be characterized as outgoing and interested in their environment. Children with high levels of Surgency/Extraversion could be characterized as highly active and constantly exploring their environment with disregard for rules and regulations on their behavior. This high approach tendency can result in frustration when goals are blocked, as evidenced by the relation between Surgency/Extraversion and frustration. For example, young children high on Surgency/Extraversion have been shown to use aggressive strategies to overcome barriers when seeking something perceived as highly rewarding. Children with high levels of Surgency/Extraversion may have difficulty regulating their distress when faced with disappointment, resulting in acting out behavior. These uninhibited children are low on internalizing and reticence, which would presumably buffer against their acting out behavior.
Personality according to Chess and Thomas
Personality is shaped by the constant interplay of temperament and environment
Chess and Thomas nine key traits of temperament
- Activity level
- Rhythmicity (the regularity or irregularity of the child’s basic biological functions)
- Approach-withdrawal (the child’s response to novelty)
- Adaptability (the adaptability of behavior to changes in the environment
- Threshold intensity of reaction (the minimum intensity of stimulation required to evoke a response)
- Intensity of reaction
- Quality of mood (the child’s general mood, negative or positive)
- Distractibility
- Attention span/persistence (the child’s attention and his persistence in an activity)
The intention of Thomas and Chess’s study
They tested their concept of personality by conducting a systematic long-term investigation of the differences in the behavioral reactions of infants. The study was designed to determine whether or not these differences persist through childhood, and it focused on how a child’s behavioral traits interact with specific elements of his environment.
The method of Thomas and Chess’s study
Detailed descriptions of children’s behavior through structured interviews with their parents at regular intervals beginning when the child had reached an age of two to three months. They questioned parents about such matters as how the child reacted to the first bath, to wet diapers, to the first taste of solid food. Independent checks by trained observers established that the descriptions of the children’s behavior supplied by the parents in these interviews could be accepted as reliable and significant. As the children grew older, these interviews were supplemented by interviews with teachers and by tests of the children themselves.
Goodness of fit (Thomas & Chess)
When the properties of the environment and its expectations and demands are in accord with the organism’s own capacities, characteristics, and style of behaving. If there is a match between an individual’s temperament and the environment, optimal development can be achieved. Conversely, poorness of fit leads to maladaptive functioning. They also asserted that when assessing goodness of fit, consideration must be
given to the values and demands of an individual’s culture and socioeconomic group.
Rothbart and Bates definition of temperament
Temperament is thought to be a relatively stable construct that helps to predict how children react to and manage their environments. The construct of temperament is commonly viewed as the basic organization of personality, which is observable as early as infancy and becomes elaborated over the course of development as the individual’s skills, abilities, cognitions, and motivations become more sophisticated.Although temperament is thought to influence the development and expression of personality characteristics, they qualified this relation with the assertion that temperament focuses on reactive and self-regulatory processes and is only one component of a child’s developing personality. Rothbart and Putnam (2002) suggested that a child’s temperament as it interacts with the environment is likely a better predictor of developmental outcomes than temperament alone.
Method (Rothbart):
Mary Rothbart and her colleagues created a childbehavior questionnaire that provided scores on 195 questions divided into 15 different scales. Parents were asked to decide how well each item applied to their child during the past half year. The results suggested three dimensions of temperamental variation, providing a profile of each child’s temperament.
Peer environment influence on children’s behavior
as children enter kindergarten, the peer environment becomes increasingly important. Peers may help highly active children recognize when their behavior is not acceptable, and conversely peers may help to reinforce appropriate behavior. The role of the peer environment has been thought to be an important predictor of whether a child is able to successfully redirect at-risk characteristics to more positive behavior. Having positive peer relationships is predictive of positive outcomes, including better social skills, better conflict-resolution skills, more cooperative behavior, less disruptive behavior, an overall positive self-concept.
Peer rejection influence on children’s behavior
Difficult temperamental characteristics have also been associated with peer rejection. Although peer acceptance can be protective and peer rejection is a risk factor for later behavior problems, particularly for children with other individual and environmental risk factors, the rejected status group is heterogeneous, making the exploration of individual differences important. One such factor theorized to influence child behavior is children’s interpretation of their acceptance. For example, rejected children tend to overestimate their acceptance, whereas popular and average children tend to underestimate their acceptance. For example, rejected children tend to overestimate their acceptance, whereas popular and average children tend to underestimate their acceptance. For example, rejected children tend to overestimate their acceptance, whereas popular and average children tend to underestimate their acceptance.
The association between aggression and social cognitive deficits
aggressive children may not perceive their environments accurately, which would hinder their ability to perceive feedback from peers about the appropriateness of their behavior.
