An overview of temperament and development

An Overview of Temperament
and Development through
Eysenck’s and Kagan’s
Approaches
By Tanya-Maria Geritsidou
The American College of Greece

What is Temperament?
Thomas and Chess (1977) described it
as a behavioral style, referring to the
‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ or ‘why’ of
behavior
 General consensus across theories
and approaches defines temperament
as those personality traits that meet
certain commonly accepted criteria

Criteria for Temperament
Traits
 Must appear as early as possible in
human development (preferably in
infancy)
 Must present strong links to
physiological and biological processes
 Must be likely to be heritable
 Must show adequate continuity and
persistence throughout the
development of personality

Some Important Points about
Temperament (Zentner & Bates, 2008)
Goodness Of Fit:
 Psychological
development isn’t
only influenced by
the individual’s
temperament, but
also by how much
it fits the culture
and practices of
the society the
person is part of.
Parental Response:
 Psychological
development isn’t
only influenced by
the individual’s
temperament, but
also by the
adequacy of the
parental responses
to this
temperament.

TEMPERAMENT
COMPONENTS AND
TYPOLOGY
What Traits and Categories are we Talking About?

Behavioral Inhibition (Fear)
 Kagan describes it as a behavioral
pattern where the individual shows
shyness, fear, withdrawal and/or
timidity to stimuli that are unknown,
unfamiliar or pose some kind of risk.
 Its core feature is an intolerance to
uncertainty
 Connected to the processes of the
amygdala (Moehler et al., 2008)

Irritability / Frustration
(Zentner and Bates, 2008)
 Irritability refers to how easily an infant is
upset to minor discomforts in relation to
others
 We measure it by how frequent and intense is
the displayed negative affect (crying, more
intense movement, etc) and how much
difficulty the infant presents to his/her
caretakers (resistance to comfort,
demandingness in cries, etc)
 Frustration is a negative affect in reaction to
interruption of ongoing tasks, or blocking of
behaviors related to approach & goal
attainment
 Has been attributed to differences in neural
circuits regarding responses to unconditioned

Positive Emotionality
 It is the behavioral system responsible
for the processing of information
regarding potential rewards
 When we talk about positive emotionality
we refer to measurement of frequency
and/or intensity of positive emotions
(eagerness, approach, interest, joy,
positive anticipation, etc)
 Has been linked to neural circuits such
as the midbrain dopamine systems and
systems controlling locomotion such as
the nucleus accumbens (Rothbart, 2007)

Activity Level
(Buss and Plomin, 1984)
 It is defined as the total energy output
(i.e. the amount of movement)
measured in a response
 Elements include:
 Frequency of activity per time unit (e.g. talking
speed)
 Duration (time spent in energetic activity in
relation to peers)
 Reaction to “forced idleness” and its resulting
restlessness

Effortful Control
 It is the ability to inhibit a dominant
response and/or activate a
subdominant response, to plan, to
detect errors, and to attain goals (Rothbart
& Bates, 1998)
 It consists of :
 Attentional control: the ability to maintain
attention on a task but also shift attention when
needed)
 Inhibitory control: the ability to suppress
inappropriate action (delay of gratification,
resistance to temptation, etc)

What are these temperament
components predictors for?
 Behavioral inhibition  anxiety,
withdrawal, shyness
 Irritability/Frustration  poor task
orientation, aggression, anger
 Positive Emotionality  social
potency, approach, reward & novelty
seeking
 Effortful Control  self-regulatory
competence, cognitive competence,
distractibility/attention span
 Activity Level  energy and liveliness

Temperament Typologies
 Thomas and Chess
 Easy
 Slow to Warm Up
 Difficult
 Kagan
 High – reactive (frequent motor activity and crying
at unexpected appearance of unfamiliar stimulus)
 Low – reactive (minimal motor activity and crying at
unexpected appearance of unfamiliar stimulus)
 Eysenck
 Introverts vs Extroverts
 Neurotic vs Emotionally stable people
 Psychopaths vs Sociopaths

TEMPERAMENT AND
DEVELOPMENT
How does this add to developmental insights?

Developmental Aspects of
Temperament
Temperament itself develops.
Different systems of temperament and
regulation develop and are activated
over time:
Emotional and Motor Reactivity
Behavioral Inhibition
(reactive/emotional)
Effortful Control (self- regulative)

Temperament Stability and
Change
Temperament remains stable during
stages, and changes between stages.
These stages can be
considered/studied within specific age
ranges, or across several time
intervals.

Interaction of Regulatory
Systems of Temperament
The systems that develop compete with
each other and regulate each other,
making temperament a result of their
constant interaction and competition

This interaction is important for the
internalization of societal and cultural
expectations and conscience.
Failure in the normative development of
any of these systems increases the
risk for development of behavioral
problems.

Kagan’s Biotypical Approach to
Temperament
 The approach is inductive rather than
theory-driven
 Studied behavioral inhibition to
unfamiliarity vs. lack of it by taking
neurological/biological measurements
of infants in assorted longitudinal
studies

Temperament
 Results yielded the typology of
◦ high-reactive infants
◦ low-reactive infants
 High Reactive infants were three times more
likely than Low Reactive infants to develop
anxiety symptoms by age 7 years (1999)
 High Reactive infants reported more bouts of
sadness, frequent heart-rate changes and
systolic blood pressure at ages 11 and 15 years
(2004; 2007)

Temperament
 HR and LR infants are distinctive
categories, not extremes of a continuum,
with different physiological and
psychological factors (2008)
 A great variety of different personalities
may emerge from either category
depending on encountered environments
(e.g. social class, culture, family,
historical era) but the temperament will
impose certain restraints on possible
outcomes

Eysenck’s Biosocial Theory of
Personality (1967; 1990)
Temperament  Personality
Factors (traits) of Personality are organized in a hierarchy,
where the top tier is occupied by the Superfactors (or
Supertraits) of Temperament. They are stable across time
and situation and very unlikely to change.

 The PEN Model: Comprised of 3
personality dimensions
◦ Psychoticism (P)
◦ Extraversion (E)
◦ Neuroticism (N)

Psychoticism (P)
 Associated with aggression and the risk
of experiencing a psychotic episode or
break with reality
 High in P
 Aggressiveness
 Interpersonal hostility / coldness
 Amoral reasoning / lack of empathy
 Sensation seeking
 Believed to be associated with levels of
dopamine

Extraversion (E)
 Associated with arousal and positive affect
(sociability, impulsivity, liveliness, action-seeking)
 There is an optimal level of arousal. Big deviation
from that optimal level leads to deterioration of
task performance
 People overaroused and jittery  introverts
(seeking less stimulation)
 People underaroused and bored  extroverts
(seek more stimulation)
 Based on cortical arousal and correlation with
grey matter/white matter volume

Neuroticism (N)
 Associated with anxiety, and response to
stressors and frustration (negative affect)
 High in N
 Negative affect to minor stressors
 Low effortful control
 Risk for phobias, panic attacks, depression
 Based on activation thresholds in the
sympathetic nervous system which is
responsible for the fight/flight response (low
threshold  high in N; high threshold  low
in N)

Kagan and Eysenck’s PEN
model
In a study by Muris et al. (2007)
Kagan’s Behavioral Inhibition Scale
(BIS) was tested against Eysenck’s
PEN model:
 Behavioral inhibition correlated strongly with
high neuroticism (N)

CONTRIBUTIONS OF
TEMPERAMENT TO
DEVELOPMENT
Drawing some conclusions and making some thoughts

 Implications in learning processes and
methods (e.g. extroverts are more
susceptible to reward and introverts more
susceptible to punishment)
 Implications in the importance of caregiver
treatments according to children’s
temperament (e.g. providing appropriate
stimulation according to an infant’s reactivity)
 Implications in proper parenting skills for
good socialization

Thank you for your excellent
display of
Effortful Control!

References
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