Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education

Transcription

1 School Psychology Review 1998, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education Mary K. Rothbart and Laura B. Jones University of Oregon Abstract: In recent years, advances in the study of temperament have identified a short list of temperament dimensions. These include positive emotionality/approach, fear, irritability/ frustration, attentional persistence and activity level. In this article, we review research on the first four of these dimensions, briefly linking them to underlying biological systems. We then apply our knowledge of temperament to teachers approaches to children s mastery motivation, fear of novelty, and ego based anxiety. We argue that educators training should include a basic understanding of the development of temperament as well as methods for assessing individual differences in children s emotional reactivity and attentional selfregulation. Recent increases in our understanding of temperament have created new ways for approaching the education of the child. These approaches allow us to appreciate the ways in which children differ from another, and the positive contributions of this variability to the classroom and society. In this article, we begin with some introductory remarks on temperament and schooling. We then review results of studies identifying basic dimensions of temperament that can affect children s exploration, discovery, and learning as well as their discouragement, anger, and avoidance of potential sources of knowledge. We describe the structure of temperament as it has emerged from research during the past two decades, briefly linking this structure to theories of underlying biological systems. The structure of temperament that has emerged includes individual tendencies toward fear, angedfrustration, positive affect and approach, activity level, and effortful or executive attention. These emotional, energetic, and attentional systems have been conserved in evolution and are associated in theories of temperament with underlying neural networks and neurotransmitter activity. We consider implications of individual variability in these tendencies for the child s experiences in school. We discuss ways in which mastery motivation may be related to children s fear and avoidant tendencies, approach, and effortful control of emotion and action. Finally, we review implications of a temperamental understanding of children for the training of educators and the assessment of children. Temperament and Schooling In theories of temperament, early individual differences in emotionality, activity level, and attention are seen as based on a set of brain systems underlying children s reactivity and selfregulation (Rothbart, Derryberry, & Posner, 1994). When there is variability in the sensitivity of these systems, the same stimulus does not have the same effect for all: children differ in how easily and intensely they become fearful, frustrated, or positively excited. They differ in capacities for attentional self-regulation. By the time of school entry, temperament affects the nature of the child s adjustment to the requirements and challenges of the educational setting. Experiences of success and failure in the school related to these adjustments influence the child s representations and evaluations of self, school, teachers and peers. This work has been supported with NIMH Grant No awarded to the first author. Address all correspondence concerning this article to Mary K. Rothbart, Department of Psychology, 1227 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Maryroth@oregon.uoregon.edu. Copyright 1998 by the National Association of School Psychologists, ISSN

2 480 School Psychology Review, 1998, Vol. 27, No. 4 Although temperament researchers had originally believed that temperament systems would be in place very early in development and change little with the passage of time (e.g., Buss & Plomin, 1984), we have since learned that temperament systems follow a developmental course (Rothbart, 1989; Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Children s reactive tendencies to both experience and express negative and positive emotions, and their responsivity to events in the environment can be observed very early in life, but children s self-regulatory executive attention develops relatively late and continues to develop throughout the early school years. Because executive attention is involved in the regulation of emotions, some school children will be lacking in controls of emotion and action that other children can demonstrate with ease. The influence of temperament upon personality and schooling and contributions of the school to personality can be considered in numerous ways. Temperament refers to the relative strength of children s emotional reactions and related behaviors as well as their capacities for self-regulation. Emotional reactions and selfregulatory capacities are important in child development. Children differ, however, in the strengths of their temperamental tendencies and capabilities. Some children are at the extremes of temperament; for example, some children tend to approach new situations rapidly and impulsively, are less subject to fear and have less capacity for attentional control than others. Some children are easily overwhelmed by stimulation; some show powerful tendencies to irritability and frustration. Children at the extremes clearly demonstrate the power of temperament in the classroom, and it is important to take these temperament characteristics into account. While children s individual differences influence their own adaptation to the classroom, these characteristics also have an important influence on how students are viewed and treated by their teachers. Thomas and Chess (1977) developed the concept goodness-of-fit to describe how well children s characteristics, capacities and temperament meet the expectations and demands of the environment (Keogh, 1994; Thomas & Chess, 1977; Thomas, Chess, &Birch, 1968). The goodness-of-fit concept provides a framework for thinking about interactions between children and the classroom environment. Maintenance of classroom order is a priority for teachers. When teachers are presented with behavior potentially disruptive to classroom routine, they must make quick decisions about how to manage and respond to this behavior. Poor fit can result when children s characteristics fail to meet teacher s expectations of acceptable behavior. Teachers have a priori ideas about the qualities of a model student (Keogh, 1989); these qualities include temperament variables such as high attention span, adaptability and approach, and low activity and reactivity. Students are viewed as more teachable when they closely match this set of variables, and less teachable the fiuther they are from the set. The quality of the teacher-child interaction also is related to this match. In one study, Martin ( 1989) reported that children distractible and low in attention received more criticism from their teachers. Pullis (1985) discovered that when teachers thought children were capable of, but not practicing, self-control, they were more likely to discipline the children with more punitive and coercive discipline techniques. Increasing teachers understanding of children s individual differences and their relation to adaptations or problems can be extremely helpful in shifting the focus from teachers negative attributions of purposeful misbehavior to active problem-solving. Increasing teachers awareness of how children s temperament dimensions might contribute to the situation can lead to reduced conflict (Pullis, 1985) and to the development of appropriate strategies specific to the temperament dimensions involved. When children feel accepted and respected as individuals, the focus moves from one of accusation to one of support; children feel less compelled to expend energy defending their positions and they are more inclined to consider alternatives for resolving problems. While individual differences play a role in children s initial goodness-of-fit to the classroom environment, especially for children at the extremes of temperament, it also is helpful to consider how these processes underlie adjustment and adaptation to the school environment for all children. For children generally, punishment can lead to inhibition and avoidance; failure can lead to defense or frustration. Positive affect and goal orientation are related to curiosity and energy for most children, and executive attention supports children s flexible response. The dynamics of these systems are important in maintaining and enhancing children s motivation in the classroom,

3 Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education 48 1 not just for children at the extremes, but for all children, and we consider these dynamics in the next section of this article. Finally, temperament does not account for all aspects of school experience. Children s reactions to success and failure in the classroom are subject to powerful socializing influences in the home and during previous schooling. For example, temperament affects self-evaluations, but children will enter schools with differing degrees of preparation for classroom learning, and with personalities that vary in their vulnerability and resilience to challenge and disappointment. Children whose parents have given unconditional support are more likely to have more stable positive selfevaluations; children whose parents have been rejecting or conditional in their acceptance are likely to be less resilient (Harter, 1998). Dimensions of Treatment Although temperament theory has an ancient history, its application to child study has been relatively recent (see review in Rothbart & Bates, 1998). In the great normative developmental studies of the 1920s and 1930s, Gesell (1928) and Shirley (1 933) identified what Shirley called the early core of personality. Gesell and Shirley argued that although children s emotional reactions change with development (for example, children decrease in their expressed negative emotion with age), children s individuality can nevertheless be observed in such reactions as fear, positive affect, humor, and irritability. Gesell noted that for any set of temperament characteristics, alternative pathways for development also will exist, dependent upon the child s social experiences. To illustrate this principle, he used lhe case of CD, who had maintained her tendencies to positive emotions, beginning at the time that she was nine months old She is now five years of age, and in spite of a varied experience in boarding homes and institutions she has not lost these engaging characteristics. They are part and parcel of her makeup.... It can be predicted with much certainty that she will retain her present emotional equipment when she is an adolescent and an adult. But more than this cannot be predicted in the field of personality. For whether she becomes a delinquent, and she is potentially one, will depend upon her subsequent training, conditioning, and supervision. She is potentially, also, a willing, helpful, productive worker. (Gesell, 1928, cited in Kessen, 1965, p. 223) Parents and educators employ training, conditioning and supervision of children in the hope and expectation of positive developmental outcomes. To do this well, it is helpful when the child s reactive and regulative equipment is taken into account. Researchers with the greatest impact on studies of temperament in childhood are psychiatrists Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas and their colleagues in the New York Longitudinal Study, (NYLS); (Thomas & Chess, 1977, Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig, & Korn, 1963). The NYLS researchers initially conducted a content analysis on mother s reports of their children s behavior during the first six months of life, identifying nine dimensions of temperament variability. The dimensions they identified included children s activity level, threshold for reaction, rhythmicity of eating, sleeping and bowel movement patterns, intensity of response, approach versus withdrawal to new situations, general mood, adaptability to change, distractibility and attention spadpersistence. Recent research however, suggests important revisions of this list (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). In part, revisions of the list are required because temperament develops. The NYLS content analysis was based on individual variability in young infants. The dimensions identified characterize children early in life; laterdeveloping dimensions were not considered. One major area undergoing development is effortfid or executive attention (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996): the orienting and distractibility observed in young infants early months of life is chiefly reactive and automatic. Beginning late in the first year and developing through the grade school years, however, executive attentional control allows increasing self-regulation of behavior and emotion. A second reason why revisions of the NYLS dimensions are needed is that the nine NYLS dimensions, devised for clinical and not psychometric purposes, show considerable conceptual overlap (Rothbart & Mauro, 1990). For example, NYLS mood and adaptability dimensions overlap with each other and with the approach-withdrawal construct. This conceptual overlap is reflected in research findings. Measures of some of the nine dimensions are so strongly intercorrelated that a I

4 482 School Psychology Review, 1998, Vol. 27, No. 4 single dimension is indicated (e.g., approachwithdrawal and adaptability); for other dimensions, different aspects of a postulated dimension are not sufficiently related to each other. For example, a child may not be intense in both fear and positive reactions, thereby lowering internal reliability for an intensity scale (see reviews by Martin, Wisenbaker, & Huttunen, 1994; Rothbart & Mauro, 1990). Factor analytic work reviewed by Martin et al. (1 994) and Rothbart and Mauro (1 990) suggests that the dimensions identified by the NYLS can be described by a smaller number of factors. For school-age children, this shorter list of temperament dimensions includes negative emotionality assessed in fear and irritability/ frustration as well as approacwpositive affect, attentional persistence, and activity level (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Two much smaller factors, rhythmicity and threshold, have been found in some studies. In the next section, we briefly review the first four of these dimensions, includmg emotional reactivity dimensions and the later developing executive attentional selfregulatory system. We also briefly refer to links made between these systems and underlying brain systems. The references to brain systems will not be clear to all readers, and can be skipped, but they are important. For readers who desire an introduction to some of the ideas presented here, books by Posner and Raichle (1 994), LeDoux ( 1996), and Panksepp ( 1998) are recommended. Positive AffectIApproach This cluster of temperament dimensions includes positive affect and rapid approach of rewarding objects or events. Individual differences in positive affect can be observed very early and they show considerable stability across the first year of life. Smiling is related to the rapidity of infants approach to novel objects as early as 6 months of age (Rothbart, 1988). Smiling and laughter in the laboratory during infancy also predict activity, approach, and impulsivity at seven years of age as reported by children s mothers (Rothbart, Derryberry, & Hershey, 1995). In our research assessing temperament in children 3 to 7 years of age, using the Children s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 1997), we found activity level to be related to a broad factor that also includes approach and positive affect and we have called this factor Surgency or Extraversion. Gray (1 987) described a similar Behavioral Activation System (BAS), which responds to signals of reward. It involves the recruiting of dopamine systems facilitating action. Depue and Iacono (1989) also described a doparnine-related Behavioral Facilitation System (BFS). Blockage of this system is seen to lead to imtative and aggressive behavior to remove the obstacle or threat. A similar approach system is Panksepp s ( 1986a) Expectancy-Foraging System, which includes motor and autonomic responses to emotional states such as desire, curiosity, anticipatory eagerness, and locomotion. All of these models posit neural systems linked to positive affect and related to facilitated behavior, particularly in the form of approach (Rothbart, Derryberry, & Posner, 1994). As discussed below, the approach system is of central importance to schooling, in its associations with curiosity, eagerness, and energy toward goal satisfaction related to the construct of mastery motivation. When it is not controlled, however, the child may show failure of self-regulation in the classroom. Fear Fearfulness can be defined as a tendency to negative affect and inhibition or withdrawal in response to novelty, challenge, or signals of punishment. This dimension has been called withdrawal in the NYLS studies (Thomas & Chess, 1977), fearfulness (Rothbart, 1989) and behavioral inhibition (Kagan, 1994). Individual differences in fearfulness to novelty can be seen by the last quarter of the first year of life, and fear reactions in older infants are predictable from four-month-olds negative affect and activity in response to stimulation at four months of age (Kagan, 1998). Individual differences in children behavioral inhibition and shyness show considerable stability with time, and infants fear reactions in the laboratory during the first year of life are predictive of their mothers reports of children s fear and shyness at age seven years (Rothbart et al., 1995). Of all the temperament systems, fear has probably been the most studied by neuroscientists (e.g., Davis, 1992; LeDoux, 1996; review by Rothbart, Derryberry, & Posner, 1994). Fear responses are rapidly recruited in the amygdala, part of the brain s limbic system. Gray (1 982) described fear or anxiety reactions in terms of a Behavioral Inhibition System or BIS. In Gray s

5 Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education 483 model, brain circuits underlying the BIS include hippocampus, subiculum, septum and related structures. The BIS opposes the behavioral approach of the BAS. Because many situations involve cues related to both reward and punishment, reward cues would trigger the BAS, punishment cues the BIS. Persons with stronger BAS tendencies will then be more likely to act in a given situation and be seen as extraverted; those with stronger BIS to become shy, inhibited or introverted. A fear reaction includes many response levels (see Rothbart et al., 1994 for review), including arousal, recruitment of attention toward the fear object and possible escape routes, autonomic nervous system effects (heart rate and respiratory increases, sweaty palms), and somatic nervous system reactions (muscle tension, arrest of ongoing behavior, tendency to startle). Influences of fear or anxiety in disrupting thinking, e.g., in children s test anxiety, have been an object of interest of school psychologists for many years (e.g., Sarason, Lighthall, Davidson, Waite, & Ruebush, 1960). Irritability/Frustration Irritability/frustration is defined as affect in response to failure in goal attainment, removal of reward, or blockage of progress toward a goal. In some factor analyses of temperament data on school-age children, this dimension forms part of a cluster of Negative Emotionality, combined with fearfulness, tendencies to discomfort, and sadness; in other studies, it emerges as a separate factor (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Infant research, however, uniformly differentiates these two forms of negative affect. In Gray s (1982) theoretical model, the amygdala, hypothalamus, and midbrain support aggressive and defensive behavior in response to frustration and form a fighvflight system. Early fiustration reactions of infants in the laboratory are predictive of children s reactions to frustration (and their levels of aggression) as reported by their mothers when the children are seven years of age (Rothbart et al., 1995). Like fear, frustration has important implications for school situations associated with failure, aggression, and defensive tendencies. Attention Span/ Effortful Control Attentional processes show considerable development from infancy through the early school years (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). Infants demonstrate reactive orienting that, when sustained, appears to be related to interest in an object. This orienting system is subject to habituation, when repeated events no longer evoke as strong a reaction, but it also supports learning, when an event indicates where something interesting or important will appear next (Posner & Raichle, 1994). The posterior orienting network, including cortical, midbrain and thalamic areas, underlies early orienting (Posner & Raichle, 1994). Children differ in both their latency to orient and in their duration of orienting to novelty (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). Individual differences in duration of orienting in infancy are related to caregiver reports of smiling and laughter and vocal activity (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). By late in the first year of life, a second, more anterior brain system is developing that will allow deployment of attention in the service of longerterm goals as well as planning and persistence in the face of distraction (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). We have called this the executive attention system, and it supports effortful control, that is, the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant response. Executive attention has been the subject of considerable recent study by neuropsychologists and cognitive psychologists. Executive or effortful attention is related to the activation of midline frontal brain areas, including the anterior cingulate and adjacent structures (Posner & Raichle, 1994). Effortful control constructs have become extremely important in understanding influences of temperament on behavior. Until recently, almost all of the major theories of temperament have focused on its more reactive aspects related to reward, punishment, and arousal to stimulation. Thus, people have been seen to be at the mercy of their temperamental tendencies to approach or avoid a situation or stimulus, given reward or punishment cues. More extraverted individuals were expected to be sensitive to reward and to show tendencies to rapid approach; more fearful or introverted individuals, sensitive to punishment, showing inhibition or withdrawal from excitement (Gray, 1975). Systems of effortfbl control, however, allow the approach of situations in the face of immediate cues for punishment., and avoidance of situations in the face of immediate cues for reward. The programming of effortful control is critical to socialization. The work of Kochanska (1995) indicates that the

6 484 School Psychology Review, 1998, Vol. 27, No. 4 development of conscience is related to temperamental individual differences in effortful control. The home and the school are two of the major sites for programming attention, effort, and conscience. Using these dimensions of temperament variability as a starting point, we now consider issues that relate temperament to the classroom. Applying Temperament Systems to the Classroom Rothbart, Ahadi, and Hershey (1 994) described some of the basic ways in which temperament can be seen to affect children s social experience, and we would expect these to apply to the classroom as well as to the home. First, individual differences in temperament mean that the same environment will be processed differently by different children. Some children will be more easily overwhelmed by intense levels of stimulation (e.g., noise, activity) than others; our data indicate that these children also are likely to be more fearful (Rothbart et al., 1997). The reaction we are referring to is not equivalent to fear, however; it is a feeling of discomfort that may make processing comitive material more difficult. Other children have stronger tendencies to positive affect and potentially out-of-control action; these children may become especially excited about upcoming positive events, and they are likely to be more subject to contagious excitement. These temperamental reactions, in turn, will form the basis for children s affective memories and evaluations of the classroom and their classroom habits. For some children, a teacher s actions that might be expected to gain the child s focus of attention also will not be sufficient, and these children may fail to be influenced by what the teacher is saying and doing. Teachers can directly address some of these tendencies. Fearful children, for example, can benefit by gradual introduction of new information and novel situations, until they are comfortable with them. With higher comfort levels, inhibition of behavioral response is less likely, permitting the child to have a relatively positive experience with novel situations. For children highly sensitive to overstimulation, loud and boisterous activity can be stressful and fatiguing, and quiet places allowing them recover from excitement are helpful. Children who are very active may require motor outlets in opportunities for exercise and movement. Motor activities (pointing, reaching, moving fkom one location to another, retrieving objects) also can be used as an adjunct to teaching. Temperamental processes also are strongly implicated in the nature of social learning. Gray (1975, 1982) described individuals with high behavioral activation systems (BAS) as more subject to reward; individuals with high behavioral inhibition systems (BIS) as more subject to punishment. This has important implications for the classroom. Much of what adults require of children involves the inhibition of actions the child might prefer to be doing, so that for children with a strong BIS, compliance will be much easier than for children with,a strong BAS and a weak BIS. For the latter children, it may be more important to stress what the child can do in a given situation rather than what a child should not be doing. On the other hand, children with a strong BIS can become more easily discouraged and may benefit from frequent but accurate feedback about their performance, to counteract their tendencies to discouragement. Attentional switching also may be so difficult for some children that both rewards and punishments may have little effect. One temperament characteristic also can be used to moderate or control another. Children higher in positive affectlapproach will be more likely to become excited about upcoming events, but unless these reactions are controlled by the BIS (fear or inhibition) or by attentional capacities, they are likely to become excited about topics that are not part of the teacher s agenda. When an outgoing chiid is deficient in executive attentional control, it may be especially dificult to shift the child s enthusiasms in the direction the teacher has chosen. Fearfulness or behavioral inhibition to punishment or challenge (Kagan, 1998) works in opposition to approach, with more inhibited children more likely to be quiet and reserved, and to resist impulsive action. Although educators often attempt to motivate children through positive means alone, in fact, classroom rules are often supported by children s fear of the results of infraction. Fear of not receiving potential rewards or the possibility of poor grades also is a motivating force in children. Forthe child not prone to temperamentally based fear or school anxiety, these influences may be less effective, and attentional control may be much more important. Both fear (the BIS) and effortful control also

7 Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education 485 may moderate children s risky, impulsive and aggressive behavior. For example, models by Lytton (1990) and Quay (Quay, Routh, & Shapiro, 1987) implicate temperament in the development of aggressive and conduct problems. Quay et al. (1987) argued that aggressive children are likely to have lower levels of the BIS as well as strongly reactive reward or approach systems (BAS). Rothbart et al. (1994) found that infants with higher activity and positive affect (BAS) in the laboratory and stronger anger/ frustration reactions were more likely to engage in aggressive behaviors at age seven; children who had been more fearful and inhibited (BIS) were less likely to behave aggressively; these latter children also showed more empathy to others. Children who tend to act quickly and impulsively, or who explode with frustration, need practice in attentional control. Cognitivebehavioral approaches for training rule-based self-control in children with attentional deficits have often not been effective (Cherkes- Julkowski, Sharp, & Stolzenberg, 1997). After the fact, this is not too surprising. These strategies often subject children to intensified cognitive demands as they attempt to invoke and apply general rules for their behavior that make compliance even more difficult. Cherkes-Julkowski et al. (1997) suggested that a master-apprentice cooperative approach to learning can be helpful in training self-regulation skills. In this approach, the teacher initially, has the executive function of organizing, regulating, and monitoring the process as a whole. It is through the joint efforts of repeated action and intersubjectivity that apprentices internalize the actions of the other (Cherkes-Julkowski et al., 1997, p. 80). Apprenticeship approaches require careful task analysis. This analysis can be further implemented by cooperative goal-directed learning using teaching aides, who can help to pace children who may work too fast or too slowly because of self-regulation problems, including anxiety about their work. Masterapprentice activity can serve important socialemotional goals for children, providing adult acceptance and support in the context of requiring effortful performance. Enlisting families and organizing volunteers (e.g., middle and high school students, retired adults, and even children from upper grades within the same school) will increase children s opportunities for these valuable one-on-one experiences. While it is hard to miss the excitement and enthusiasm expressed by children high in approach and positive affect, or the dramatic emotional displays of more highly reactive children, it also is important to identify and attend to children who are trying very hard, but for whom the process of learning does not generate such a noticeable effect. It is easy to overlook the efforts of these more subdued children and consequently, they may not experience the usual rewards of the classroom. This could lead to discouragement. Attention to working with discouraged children is helpful even though they may not be actively stirring up excitement or disrupting the classroom. By rewarding effort it may be possible to decrease children s discouragement. Rewarding children s efforts puts the focus on the process of learning. With this focus, students are less likely to compare their performance to that of others, and are more likely to concentrate on their own performance goals. Mastery Motivation We now illustrate the application of temperament ideas to an important system in support of education, namely, mastery motivation. Mastery motivation is initially closely linked to the basic emotional-motivational systems seen in young children, and hence to variability in functioning of the dimensions identified with temperament. It is further linked to children s experiences of reward and punishment in mastery-related situations. Finally, however, with the passage of time, mastery motivation becomes increasingly affected by the evaluations of others and selfevaluations reflected in ego involvement and personality. Schooling takes advantage of basic dimensions of temperament in the creation of learning environments for children. One of the most important of these is positive affect and approach. The positive affecdapproach system is an early support for what has been called mastery motivation. Messer described mastery motivation as, ba psychological force that stimulates an individual to attempt independently, in a focused and persistent manner, to solve problems and master a skill or task that is moderately challenging to him or her (Messer, 1995, p. 319). McCall(l995) used the term disposition rather than force. He argued that mastery motivation is inborn, but influenced substantially by the environment. Barrett and Morgan (1995) agreed

8 486 School Psychology Review, 1998, Vol. 27, No. 4 that mastery motivation is intrinsic to the individual. Instrumental aspects of mastery motivation include task persistence, preference for challenge or novelty, and an inclination to control one s environment. Positive affect and approach tendencies are not the only contributors to children s mastery motivation. Tendencies to fear, frustration, and effortful control are all likely additional contributors. We have previously discussed three types of selection processes linking temperament and learning: children s temperamentally based response tendencies, their experience of the emotions and their attentional capacities (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1997). Response tendencies regulate the type of information children are exposed to. Even during infancy, children act to select the level of stimulation they will experience, using self-soothing and selfstimulating behavior, or through their direction of attention (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). As noted, positive affect/approach is related to exploration and stimulus seeking, and to duration of interest. The continuing power of interest or positive involvement to influence achievement is suggested by a meta-analysis of the studies involving children in grades 5 through 12 (Schiefele, Krapp, & Winteler, 1992). In a review of 121 studies conducted in 18 different countries, Schiefele et al. found that interest accounted for 10% of the variability in children s achievement. Interest also was more strongly related to achievement in boys than in girls. In our research with college students, we have found that self-reported higher positive affect is related to higher scores on the personality dimension of openness to experience, a likely contributor to mastery motivation (Evans & Rothbart, 1998). Children also differ in their direct emotional responses to events and related learning. Fearful children and children who are easily frustrated are more prone to associate negative affect with events, while children higher in approach experience more positive affect (Rothbart, 1989). These emotional responses further influence children s fbture reactions to challenge and the child s tendency to approach or avoid challenge. Temperament variability affects the types of information an individual stores in memory. Persons high in anxiety form stronger short-term memory representations for attended negative words (Reed & Derryberry, 1995) and these representations can influence how a child views himself or others (Rothbart & Ahadi, 1994). If children are fearful, their estimation of their abilities and likelihood of their success in a given situation also may be affected, as may be their perceptions about whether novel people or objects are a source of safety or of threat (Rothbart & Ahadi, 1994). Fearfbl children who rely primarily on avoidant strategies may find temporary relief fiom their anxiety, but their ability to learn about perceived situations of threat will be limited. They may not learn they can effectively cope in these situations and may persist in representing the self as vulnerable and ineffective (Cortez & Bugental, 1995). With development, however, children s capacity for effortful control increases. Attentional control can strongly influence sources of input: children are increasingly able to shift attention away from threatening stimuli and. internal feelings of inefficacy; at the same time they can more readily focus on positive information, which can lead to improved self-evaluations relating to feelings of efficacy and success. Finally, they can overcome reactive tendencies and persist in a task, even in the midst of negative consequences (Denybeny & Rothbart, 1997). Attention is not the only route to more positive experiences for vulnerable children. It is important to remember that even the most vulnerable and negative child also has capacities for positive experiences. Accentuating the positive in the child s experience can serve to increase mastery motivation. Thinking about temperament in this way, we can consider interactions among systems that can either facilitate or inhibit children s mastery motivation. Children high in approach and low in fear may launch into new situations with zeal; this behavior is useful in that the children are continually exposed to situations with the potential for reward, but the lack of fear controls can lead to impulsive behavior. On the other hand, strong fear and weak behavioral activation can lead to overregulation of approach; children may avoid novel situations, resulting in missed opportunities for the positive experiences of mastery. For these children, accentuating the positive is important. Mastery motivation will be sustained by children s experiences of reward or nonpunishment in achievement situations (Harter, 1980). With age, however, children s responses move from taking direct pleasure in mastering tasks to added concerns about the results of their efforts and the evaluation of others based on these results. Affect is still critically important to

9 Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education 487 mastery motivation, but it is now at least partially mediated by children s views of how others view their performance, and by children s related egoinvolvement, self-evaluation and sense of competence (Harter, 1980). Harter observes that the initial purity of affective response to mastery becomes diluted by the necessity to consider the reactions of significant others in the environment. Ego-Involvement and Mastery The development of ego involvement provides an interesting perspective on children s evolving reactions to success and failure, reward and punishment. Toward the middle of the second year, children begin to show signs of selfconsciousness about their appearance and behavior (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). They increasingly express pride in mastery and shame in failure to achieve a goal (Lewis & Feiring, 1989; Stipek, Recchia, & McClintic, 1992). Now, children are more likely to complete tasks, to pause after completing a task, and to refuse help (Jennings, 1993), suggesting early links between ego and success. Lewis, Alessandri, and Sullivan (1992) found that 33- to 36-month-old children showed more pride upon success in a difficult task compared to completion of an easy task. They also showed less shame upon failure in a difficult task compared to failure on an easy task. Children at this age are beginning to recognize that exerting effort on a challenging task is important, and that they should persist until the task is complete (Barrett & Morgan, 1995). Increased self-awareness also supports the emergence of later developing shyness. Buss ( 1985) argued that self-conscious shyness occurs when children have attained an advanced, cognitive self (Buss, 1985, p. 43). This selfconscious evaluation is not so heavily dependent upon temperament. Children who have been criticized and punished by others may come to demonstrate later appearing shyness even though they earlier showed little shyness (Asendorpf, 1990). It may be useful to distinguish between early appearing temperamental fearfulness or shyness and ego-related anxiety. Temperament tendencies to fear are seen in children s inhibition of excitement and approach of new situations and challenges. In addition, however, low or vulnerable self evaluation can lead children with a wide range of temperamental endowments to become anxious about the possibility of failure andor to resist evidence that they have failed (cf. Ausubel, 1996; Ausubel, Sullivan, & Ives, 1980). Evaluative reactions may nevertheless be affected by temperamental fearfulness. Harter (1980), for example, reported rudimentary signs of fearful children s decreased interest in challenging tasks and behavioral withdrawal when they are scrutinized and evaluated by others. In our view, children s ego concerns reflect the values of their society. In the United States, ego values exist for autonomous achievement, forthrightness and consistency between public and private selves (Harter, 1998). Ego values have traditionally varied for girls and boys, with individual success more important for boys and social approval and physical attractiveness more important for girls. As children s representations of self develop, their vulnerability and anxiety about failure in these valued areas increases (Harter, 1998). Children s temperamental susceptibility to fear will be a contributor to these reactions, but at least equally important will be children s ego needs for successful performance. Anxiety is related to early experiences in the family. Children whose feelings of self-worth depend chiefly upon their individual performance will be more anxious about the possibility of failure than children who achieve vicarious success from parental acceptance (Ausubel, 1996). Temperamental tendencies to fearfulness will contribute to anxiety reactions, but under ego pressures, even a temperamentally positive and approaching child can become vulnerable to anxiety about the possibility of failure. In addition, ego-involved children will be subject to the frustration, defensiveness, avoidance, and depression related to avoiding feelings of failure and decreased self-evaluation (Harter, 1998). Asendorpf ( 1990) conducted an important longitudinal study of children s shyness and behavioral inhibition in a classroom setting. In his research, children who showed fear of strangers (early appearing shyness) were inhibited in the classroom early in the year, but by the end of the year were likely to have made an adjustment to the class setting. Other children, however, became more inhibited during the course of the school year and increasingly isolated from others. Asendorpf suggests that this later developing shyness occurs for children who have behaved in ways that led to rejection from their peers. In Asendorpf and van Aken s (1994) follow ups of the children, early appearing shyness (stranger fear) was not the major

10 488 School Psychology Review, 1998, Vol. 27, No. 4 predictor of later self-esteem; the children likely to develop lower self-esteem were those showing later developing shyness. It is important to note, however, that Asendorpf s research was conducted in German classes where children remained in the same class from year to year, allowing stronger peer influence. Cross-cultural research also suggests that the value of outgoing versus shy behavior will differ from one cultural group to another. In the United States, early appearing shyness may create more problems of adjustment than it would in Germany. However, Asendorpf s findings suggest that punishment related concerns may be at least as important as initial temperament in the development of behavior problems with selfesteem. Teachers can be alert to peer rejection in the classroom and work to create opportunities for these children to become more involved with their peers. Closely monitored small group activity in which the teacher or aide observes the group at play, models appropriate strategies for initiating peer contact, and facilitates cooperative play is one helpful way to ease children into peer relationships and bolster their confidence in social situations. Cicchetti and Tucker ( 1994) argue that early incompetence tends to promote later incompetence, because the person reaches successive stages of development with inadequate resources. Children high in fear and/or low in self-evaluation may thus come to avoid achievement situations, resulting in relative inexperience and possible feelings of inadequacy. With the development of self-awareness, the child may experience feelings of shame connected with feelings of inadequacy, leading to an even stronger fear or anxiety and avoidance in response to novel or challenging situations. This developmental progression, however, is not without recourse. Changes in the external and internal environment may lead to improvements in an individual s ability to master developmental changes and to redirect the developmental trajectory (Cicchetti & Tucker, 1994). Repeatzd opportunities for mastery in novel situations might alter the child s perception of novel experiences as threatening and bad to a perception of the experiences as safe and positive. The emergence of effortful control is another important internal element to mastery. Using effort, children now will have an increased capacity to modulate reactive systems. In older children, two kinds of academic achievement goals have been identified, one including intrinsic mastery motivation and task involvement, the other extrinsic motivation, performance evaluation, and ego involvement. In a review of the relations between these two orientations and cognitive engagement, Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle (1993) reported that, a focus on mastery or learning goals can result in deeper cognitive processing on academic tasks than a focus on the self (ego-involved) or a focus on performance (grades, besting others), which seems to result in more surface processing and less overall cognitive engagement (p. 173). In turn, mastery motivation is affected by school structure: children are more oriented toward mastery when the goals they are directed toward are meaningful and challenging, when the children themselves have some control of the direction of their effort, and when evaluations are not highly focused on external rewards, competition or social comparison. When performance is focused on reward and competition, children tend to be more concerned about doing better than others or pleasing the teacher, than on understanding the content of what is taught (review by Pintrich et al., 1993). External standards do, however, have their place in the classroom. Although it may appear that external standards interfere with the development of intrinsic motivation, standards in the classroom actually serve to maintain order in addition to providing important learning goals for children to pursue. An optimal learning environment is one in which these external standards serve as a scaffold for students as they work to cultivate their own approach to leamirig. Teachers bring vast knowledge about how to meet these standards to the classroom. This knowledge, coupled with an increased understanding of children s individual differences permits the development of approaches that best match students needs, thereby stimulating children s intrinsic motivation. What fosters the development of intrinsic motivation? Recall that the definition of mastery motivation centers on an individual s attempts to solve challenging problems. Children s individual differences contribute to their unique experience of challenge, adjustment and mastery in school, but the classroom environment will have a substantial impact on this experience. Providing extracurricular activities and multiple opportunities in the classroom for young people with a wide variety of temperament characteristics to learn and to excel also promote feelings of

11 Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education 489 mastery. Following this approach, almost all children can find a school activity they are good at. In addition, many children will develop multiple interests, so that if one learning pursuit is not going well, another will be available to shore up the child s self-evaluation and maintain motivation for mastery. Education can do many things to encourage students to find joy in learning, to welcome new opportunities, and to follow through on tasks. Temperament: Training and Assessment In this section, we apply topics we have discussed to the training of educators and school psychologists and to the use of broad-based assessment in the classroom. Because temperament variability in emotion, motivation and selfregulation strongly influence children s learning and failure to learn, it becomes necessary for the educator to follow the advice of educational psychologists to teach children, not subject matter (Sarason, 1993, p. 124). To do this, educators should understand children s temperament and personality characteristics as well as they understand their cognitive-processing capacities. This means that programs for college and university training of educators should include state-of-the-art knowledge of child temperament and development and their relation to the classroom. In the creation and implementation of this curriculum, collaborations between educators and developmental psychologists would have much to offer. A second application of temperament ideas is to assessment. As in the assessment of cognitive skills, a multidimensional approach to temperament-related assessment is helpful. Information about temperament can be obtained from the parent, so that the teacher or school psychologist can learn about aspects of the child s emotional reactivity and attentional self-regulation as they are shown outside of the classroom. Measures such as the Children s Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 1997) for children from 3 to 8 years of age or McClowry, Hegvik, and Teglasi s (1993) measure for children from 8 to 12 years of age are useful for obtaining information about temperament from the parents. Another important source of information is the classroom teacher. In assessing temperament, Keogh s Teacher Temperament Questionnaire can assist teachers with identifying children s temperamental tendencies (Pullis, 1989; Pullis & Cadwell, 1985). Assessment of classroom structure also is essential (Keogh, 1994). Keogh argued that traditional assessment focuses upon the child while ignoring critical information about contributions of the school environment to the child s adaptations (Keogh & Speece, 1996). Children high in activity, for example, may have difficulty sitting for long periods of time; highly reactive children may be bothered by noise and crowding (Rothbart & Jones, in press). In assessment, one important distinction is between the children s early appearing fearfulness and their evaluation anxiety based on ego concerns. Some shy and fearful children will be slow to adapt to new situations, including testing, and they need time and familiarity with the setting to do their best. Other problems are more related to evaluation concerns. Variations in administration of test items can be used to examine effects of ego involvement and evaluation anxiety (Smith, 1988). Smith described an apparently anxious 10-year-old who is given accurate information that she or he had responded to some of the questions at above a 16-year level; this information led to increased confidence, allowing the child to correctly perform items she or he had previously failed. Other assessment variations can investigate sources of inattentive children s errors, for example, by looking for improvement when the child s attention is directed to relevant features of a display, or when competing responses are reduced, or when background stimulation is increased or decreased (Smith, 1988). Sarason et al. (1960) noted that we often forget what a powerful figure a teacher is in the lives of children. All children benefit from a classroom atmosphere created by the teacher that fosters their desire to learn, and provides exposure to a challenging and meaningful cumculum. They benefit from a place where efforts are encouraged and rewarded; an environment where children collaborate with peers, rather than compete with them, and a climate in which children are accepted and supported regardless of their intellectual and temperament characteristics. A Zen story may apply to this last point, One day Banzan was walking through a market when he overheard a customer ask a butcher for the best piece of meat he had. Every piece in my shop is the best, the butcher said. Hearing the butcher s explanation, Banzan became enlightened (Schiller, 1997). Acceptance benefits all children, helping them achieve classroom skills by taking on new

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Behavioral individuality in early Childhood. New York: New York University Press. Thomas, A., Chess, S., Birch, H. G., & Korn, S. (1963). Behavioral individuality in early childhood. New Yo& New York University Press. Mary K. Rothbart, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. She is currently on a Senior Scientist award from NIH, allowing her to study the development of temperament and attention. Laura B. Jones is a graduate student studying developmental psychology at the University of Oregon. She is currently on an emotion training grant from NIH to study the development of attention and its influence on emotional expression.