Temperament in Children 1

Transcription

1 Temperament in Children 1 Mary K. Rothbart University of Oregon Douglas Derryberry Oregon State University 1 Presented as a State of the Art lecture at the 26th International Congress of Psychology, July, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. The authors are extremely grateful to Grazyna Kochanska for her contributions to this chapter. The research and writing of the chapter have been supported by grants from NIMH to the first author.

2 Temperament in Children Page 2 Temperament in Children The study of temperament is a recent and rapidly growing area in psychology. Developmental research has been increasingly informed by our understanding of individual differences, and the study of temperament has provided a major framework for that understanding. The role of temperament in influencing developmental pathways and outcomes has now been recognized, even in areas that have traditionally been seen as almost exclusively the result of socialization, such as early morality. Temperament constructs bring cognitive and emotional processes together and integrate them with an understanding of basic psychological and brain mechanisms. This chapter argues that recent advances in the field allow us to make rich connections with animal studies and affective neuroscience, research in social development, and research on adult temperament and personality. At the same time our field has suffered some growing pains, and some of these problems are considered here. The chapter concludes with some promising directions for the future. The study of temperament has truly demonstrated tremendous recent growth. A search of temperament-related studies from the psychlit database using the term temperament as a keyword (See Figure 1) yielded zero studies in the decade of the 1950s, increasing to over 300 Keyword References to 'Temperament' Time Period Figure 1: Number of keyword references in Psychlit to temperament from 1950 to studies in the 1970s, and over 2,000 studies in the 90s. A large number of major longitudinal studies of temperament and development have also been initiated, in Sweden (Hagekull & Bohlin, 1998), Norway (Torgersen, 1989), Finland (Pulkkinen, 1996), Australia (Sanson & Prior, 1999), Spain (Carranza, Pérez-López, Gonzalez, & Martínez-Fuentes, 2000), New Zealand (Caspi, 2000), and the U.S. (Olsen, Bates, & Bayles, 1990; Matheny, 1990; Kagan, 1992; Thomas & Chess, 1977).

3 Temperament in Children Page 3 It is actually not correct, however, to suggest that ideas about temperament are of recent origin. Temperament thought has an ancient history in both Eastern and the Western traditions, and a number of outstanding thinkers through the ages have contributed to the study of temperament. These include: Kant (1798), Wundt (as cited by Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985), Ebbinghaus (as cited by Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985), Heymans and Wiersma (as cited in Strelau, 1989), Jung (1923), Pavlov (1935), and Eysenck (1947). In addition to early studies in France (Wallon, as cited in Balleyguier, 1989), and Switzerland (Meili, 1957), the great normative studies of the 1930s in the United States led researchers to discover individual differences in temperament in young children. For example, Mary Shirley (1933) set out to study the development of infants motor milestones by intensively studying 25 infants longitudinally during the first 2 years of life. In the course of this work she discovered individual difference in the infants that she called the personality nucleus. In addition to the two volumes on motor development she had planned to write, Shirley (1933) therefore added a third on infant personality or temperament. When Shirley s child subjects were 15 years older, Neilon (1948) followed up the early temperament descriptions with independently obtained personality descriptions of the children, now adolescents. A group of clinical psychologist judges then matched the children with their infant temperament sketches considerably better than expected by chance. This work suggested that individual differences identified in infancy showed considerable developmental stability. Work on temperament in the 1960s began with Thomas and Chess pioneering efforts in the New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS; Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig, & Korn, 1963; Thomas & Chess, 1977). In the NYLS, temperament was defined as behavioral style. Using a content analysis of interview data describing a small group of infants aged 2-6 months, Thomas et al (1963) identified nine dimensions of temperament: Activity Level, Approach-Withdrawal, Mood, Rhythmicity, Persistence-Attention Span, Adaptability, Threshold, Intensity, and Distractibility. Five of these dimensions were also used to categorize children as difficult or easy. Difficult children were described as withdrawing, showing negative mood, unadaptable, with high intensity and irregularity. Children at the opposite pole of these dimensions were described as easy. A slow-to-warm-up category of children was also identified. Thomas and Chess s (1977) nine dimensions have formed the basis for many studies of temperament in childhood. Their construct of difficulty has also been widely employed, even though its use has presented problems for this field (Plomin, 1982; Rothbart, 1982). In addition to promoting the negative labeling of children from early in life, the difficulty construct does not take into account many influences of development, culture, and context. Thus, a behavior seen as difficult at one age or in one situation may not be difficult in another age or situation. For example, high withdrawal or fear, part of the difficult infant construct, predicts higher levels of conscience in preschool children and lower levels of aggression (Kochanska, 1991, 1995; review by Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Negative emotionality later in life is related to the ability to detect errors in problem solving (Luu, Collins, & Tucker, 2000). Although industrialized Western societies may associate difficulty with negative affect, in Taiwan and Brazil, difficulty is associated with the weak and ill infant (Mull, 1991, as cited by Wachs, 2000). Researchers have also frequently operationalized difficulty differently from one study to another. Sometimes rhythmicity is included in the difficulty measure, sometimes not; sometimes

4 Temperament in Children Page 4 distractibility or resistance to control is included, sometimes not; often the construct is only defined as some set of variables that includes negative emotionality. Thus, the same term means different things from one study to another, causing confusion for the field. In spite of problems with the difficulty construct, however, important advances in our understanding of the structure of temperament have been made since the original NYLS studies. We turn now to a review of this work. Going beyond the style definition of temperament offered by Thomas and Chess (1977), we have defined temperament as constitutionally based individual differences in emotional and attentional reactivity and self-regulation, influenced over time by heredity and experience (Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). This is a broad definition, and its general constructs of reactivity and self-regulation can be seen to include a number of other lists of temperament dimensions, such as Buss and Plomin's (1984) EAS (emotionality, activity, sociability), Kagan's (1998) construct of behavioral inhibition, and Goldsmith and Campos' (1986) emotionality dimensions. Identifying parameters of reactivity such as response latency, rise time, intensity and recovery time further allow its study at behavioral, psychophysiological, endocrine and neural levels (Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). Although to date, these parameters have chiefly been used in laboratory studies to assess general dimensions of temperament (e.g., Lemery, Goldsmith, Klinnert, & Mrazek, 1999; Rothbart, Derryberry & Hershey, 2000), they may in the future allow for a more dynamic view of basic temperament and developmental processes. The distinction between reactive and self-regulative characteristics has also proven useful in thinking about the general course of development, in that much of early behavior can be seen as reactive to immediate stimulus events and to endogenous changes in infant state. Later, more specific self-regulatory systems, particularly the executive attention system, will develop to modulate this reactivity (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1997; Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). Much of the second-generation work on temperament in the 1970s and 80s involved development of temperament measures. These included caregiver, teacher, and self-report questionnaires, taking advantage of the parents large database of observations of their children. Scales were developed with an acute awareness of potential biases that might result from the use of parent reports (Rothbart & Goldsmith, 1985; Rothbart & Bates, 1998). In our work, for example, we tried to minimize parent bias by asking respondents about the relative frequency of occurrence of concrete infant behaviors within the past week or two weeks, thereby avoiding global judgments, comparisons with other children, and attempting to minimize respondents memory problems (Rothbart, 1981). The content of our original scales included dimensions from animal temperament research and human behavioral genetics as well as dimensions from Thomas and Chess (1977). Unlike Thomas and Chess, we designed our scales to be conceptually independent of each other. In our item-analysis, scales for three of the Thomas and Chess dimensions did not meet a high internal reliability standard: Intensity, Threshold, and Rhythmicity (Rothbart, 1981). Only the soothability items held together for the Adaptability construct. In our initial temperament instrument, we were thus left with scales for Activity Level, Smiling and Laughter, Fear, Frustration, Duration of Orienting, and Soothability. In a subsequent home observation study, we found modest to moderate convergence between parents reports and independent home

5 Temperament in Children Page 5 observations (Rothbart, 1986). Since then, considerable data, including an important study by Hagekull, Bohlin, and Lindhagen (1984), has indicated convergence between parent-report scales and observations, and temperament. Questionnaires have, as in personality research, proven to be useful sources of information on the structure of temperament (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). A number of investigators have carried out item-level factor analysis on scales derived from the NYLS and other sources. Sanson, Prior, and Oberklaid (1985) were studying 2,400 infants in Australia when they encountered problems with a lack of independence in NYLS based scales, including very high correlations among approach, adaptability, and mood scales. Low item homogeneity was also found within a number of scales. They therefore undertook an item-level analysis (Sanson, Prior, Garino, Oberklaid, & Sewell, 1987). In Sweden, Hagekull and her colleagues (Hagekull, Lindhagen, & Bohlin, 1980) also carried out item-level analyses on NYLS scales. In the U.S., Bates carried out an item-level factor analysis of difficulty and sociability items (Bates, Freeland, & Lounsbury, 1979). Considerable overlap was found in the factor-derived scales developed from these studies, with the scales differing from several of the early NYLS dimensions (see review by Rothbart & Mauro, 1990). Temperament as reflected in the emerging structure also looked less like style, cutting across response and stimulus modalities, and more like individual differences in specific emotional/motivational systems and individual differences in attention. Overall, the dimensions identified included positive affect and approach, fear, irritability/frustration, attentional persistence, and activity level (Rothbart & Mauro, 1990). Small rhythmicity factors were also found in two of the studies. In our Oregon laboratory, we have also developed a highly differentiated and comprehensive parent report instrument called the Children s Behavior Questionnaire, or CBQ. Across a number of data sets using the CBQ, three temperament systems of Surgency/Extraversion, Negative Affectivity, and Effortful Control (See Figure 2) have emerged from our research on temperament in children 3-7 years (Rothbart, Ahadi & Hershey, 1994; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey & Fisher, 2001). The Surgency factor is primarily defined by scales assessing positive emotionality and approach, including positive anticipation, high intensity pleasure (sensation-seeking), activity level, impulsivity, smiling and laughter, and a negative loading from shyness. The Negative Affectivity factor involves positive loadings for shyness, discomfort, fear, anger/frustration, and sadness, and a negative loading from soothability-falling reactivity. The Effortful Control Factor is defined by positive loadings from inhibitory control, attentional focusing, low intensity pleasure (non-risk taking pleasure), and perceptual sensitivity. These factors conceptually and empirically map fairly well upon the Extraversion/Positive Emotionality, Neuroticism/Negative Emotionality, and Conscientiousness/Constraint dimensions found in Big Five studies of the adult personality (Ahadi & Rothbart, 1994; Rothbart, Ahadi & Evans, 2000). These broad temperament constructs further suggest that temperament dimensions go beyond lists of unrelated traits and generalized characteristics of positive and negative emotionality. Particularly important are interactions between the child s motivational impulses and his or her efforts to constrain them.

6 Temperament in Children Page 6 Extraversion/Surgency Activity Smiling & Laughter High Intensity Pleasure Impulsivity Shyness (-) Positive Anticipation Negative Affectivity Fear Anger Sadness Discomfort Soothability (-) -.25 (PRC) -.01 (USA) -.03 (PRC) -.28 (USA) Figure 2: Effortful Control Attentional Shifting Attentional Focusing Inhibitory Control Low Intensity Pleasure Perceptual Sensitivity Broad dimensions of temperament in the Children s Behavior Questionnaire, with cross-factor correlations reported for People s Republic of China (PRC) and United States (USA) samples. (Adapted from Ahadi, Rothbart, & Ye, 1993.) We used oblique factor rotations allowing us to look at correlations among these broad factors. In the People s Republic of China (PRC), we found a highly similar factor structure, but different relationships between the reactive factors and Effortful Control (Ahadi, Rothbart, & Ye, 1993; See Figure 2). In the US, but not the PRC, children higher in effortful control showed lower negative affectivity. In the PRC, but not the U.S., children higher in effortful control were less surgent and extraverted. These findings suggest differences across cultures in the behaviors seen as worthy of control (negative affect in the U.S.; outgoing behavior in China), and these in turn may be related to cultural values. The topic of culture, temperament, and socialization is an exciting area for future research. In the next section of this paper, longitudinal research on the broad constructs of surgency, negative affectivity, and effortful control is described. Surgency/Approach As noted above, Surgency/Approach includes a combination of positive affect and rapid approach tendencies that show strong similarities to the personality construct of extraversion. These findings are also generally consistent with neurophysiological models emphasizing central approach or behavioral facilitation systems (Gray & McNaughton, 1996; Depue & Collins, 1999). Individual differences in positive emotionality can be observed by the age of 2 to 3 months, in a cluster of reactions including smiling and laughter, vocal reactivity, and activity level (Rothbart, 1989). When assessed across different episodes, infants' tendency to express

7 Temperament in Children Page 7 positive reactions appears to be independent of their negative reactions (Goldsmith & Campos, 1986). This finding is consistent with other research indicating that positive and negative emotionality, in children as well as adults, are separable and largely orthogonal (Belsky, Hsieh, & Crnic, 1996; Goldberg, 1993; Kochanska, Coy, Tjebkes, & Husarek, 1998, Tellegen, Watson, & Clark, 1999; Watson & Clark, 1997; Watson & Tellegen, 1999). Lemery et al. (1999) have reported that a composite of Positive Emotionality based on questionnaire measures of smiling and laughter, pleasure, and sociability showed stability across the ages of 3 to 18 months. Infants' observed responses to episodes designed to elicit positive affect, such as brief puppet shows, were also significantly stable from the period of 9 to 33 months (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000). In our research, we have used parent report and laboratory measures in a longitudinal study of infants at the ages of 3, 6.5, 10 and 13.5 months (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000). In the laboratory, infants were videotaped during presentation of non-social (e.g., small squeezable toys, a mechanical dog, a rapidly opening parasol) and social stimuli (e.g., experimenter's speech, a peek-a-boo game). Smiling and laughter to these stimuli was coded for latency, intensity, and duration, and then aggregated into positive affect measures. Approach was assessed in infants' latency to grasp low intensity toys, and activity in 13-month olds' movement among toys distributed across a grid-lined floor. Later, at age 7 years, parents filled out the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001). Smiling and laughter in infancy predicted concurrent infant (Rothbart, 1988) as well as 7-year approach tendencies. Infant approach tendencies also strongly predicted 7-year surgency and approach. Our most striking finding was that children showing rapid approach at 6, 10, and 13 months were high in positive anticipation, impulsivity, motor activation, and low in sadness at seven years (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000). Other studies have also found stability of approach measures. Korner et al., (1985) reported that non-distress motor activity in the neonate predicted high daytime activity and approach scores at 4-8 years. Questionnaire measures of approach have also demonstrated stability during toddlerhood and early childhood (Pedlow, Sanson, Prior, & Oberklaid, 1993), and in another study, both approach and activity levels were found to be stable from 2 to 12 years (Guerin & Gottfried, 1994). Finally, Caspi & Silva (1995) found that children high on approach or confidence at age 3-4 were high on social potency and low on self-reported control (i.e., more impulsive) at age 18. In our longitudinal study (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000), infant activity predicted not only positive emotionality at age seven, but also high anger/frustration, aggression and low soothability-falling reactivity, suggesting that strong approach tendencies may contribute to externalizing negative emotionality as well as to positive emotionality (Derryberry & Reed, 1994; Rothbart, Ahadi & Hershey, 1994). Children who quickly grasped high intensity toys in the laboratory showed later higher positive anticipation, impulsivity, high anger-frustration and aggression at seven years, and tended to be low in attentional and inhibitory control. The latter finding is consistent with the idea that strong approach tendencies may constrain the development of voluntary self-control. If approach tendencies are viewed as the "accelerator" toward action and inhibitory tendencies as the "brakes", it is not surprising that stronger accelerative tendencies may weaken the braking influence of inhibitory control (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000).

8 Temperament in Children Page 8 Negative Affectivity Initial forms of negative emotionality include early irritable forms of distress, followed by more organized states related to frustration and fear. Irritability during the first several months may arise from both internal and external sources, and is related to both later fear and more frustration as the infant actively engages the environment (Rothbart & Bates, 1998; Rothbart, et. al, in press b). Our laboratory measures were also coded for infants distress to situational elicitors of fear (novel, intense, and unpredictable stimuli) and frustration (placement of attractive toys out of reach or behind a plexiglass barrier). (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000). Late in the first year, some infants began to demonstrate fear in their inhibited approach to unfamiliar and intense stimuli. Other research has indicated that this inhibition can be predicted by a measure of combined crying and motor reactivity at four months (Calkins, Fox, Marshall, 1996; Kagan, 1992). It is likely that fear-related inhibitory control reduces the stability of approach during infancy. Once fearful inhibition is established, however, individual differences in the relative strength of approach versus inhibition appear to be relatively enduring aspects of temperament in novel or intense situations (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). As with approach, fear-related inhibition shows considerable stability across childhood and even into adolescence (Kagan, 1998). Longitudinal research indicates stability of fearful inhibition from 2 to 4 years (Lemery, et al., 1999), from 2 to 8 years (Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1988) and from the preschool period to age 18 (Caspi & Silva, 1995). In our longitudinal sample (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000), laboratory fear predicted fear and shyness at seven years. Fear also predicted later sadness, and low intensity (non-risk taking) pleasure, and thus was generally related to internalizing tendencies. Laboratory fear did not predict frustration/anger in childhood. While these findings illustrate the stability of fear and its relation to internalizing tendencies, other relations suggest its regulatory capacity. High laboratory fear at 13 months predicted low positive anticipation, impulsivity, activity level, and aggression at age seven. These negative relations are consistent with models such as Gray and McNaughton s (1996), where an anxiety-related behavioral inhibition system inhibits an approach-related behavioral activation system. Children with concurrent ADHD and anxiety also show reduced impulsivity relative to children with ADHD alone (Pliszka, 1989), and aggressiveness appears to decrease between kindergarten and first grade in children who show internalizing patterns (Bates, Pettit, & Dodge, 1995). We also found evidence that infants with greater fear showed more empathy and guilt/shame during childhood (Rothbart, et. al, 1994). These relations suggest a role for fear in the development of early conscience, and converge with the work of Kochanska on the development of conscience (Kochanska 1991, 1995). Kochanska has found that temperamental fearfulness is a source of both main and interaction effects in the emerging internalization of rules of conduct. More fearful children were found to show more internalized conscience, although this main effect was chiefly present during the younger ages in toddlerhood. As children grew older, at ages 4-5 years, this direct link was gradually replaced by a more complex interaction with maternal socialization. Fearful children whose mothers used gentle discipline, likely capitalizing on the child's temperamental tendency to experience anxious states, developed

9 Temperament in Children Page 9 highly internalized conscience. These findings suggest developmentally changing pathways through which early temperament and socialization can influence the development of high-level social- cognitive processes. In our laboratory study, frustration at 6 and 10 months predicted seven-year anger/frustration but not fear, as well as other components of negative affectivity, including high discomfort, high guilt/shame, and low soothability (Rothbart, Derryberry, et al., 2000). In complementary findings to relationships between early positive emotionality and later frustration, greater infant frustration in the laboratory was also related to higher seven-year activity level, positive anticipation, impulsivity, aggression, and high intensity pleasure. While infant fear is thus related to relatively weak approach behavior and to internalizing tendencies in childhood, infant frustration is related to stronger approach and to externalizing as well as internalizing tendencies. This relation between approach and frustration is consistent with Panksepp's (1998) suggestion that unsuccessful reward-related activities may activate the anger/frustration functions of a Rage system. Strong approach tendencies may include positive expectations and frustrated reactions under conditions when those expectations are not met. Fear, on the other hand, appears to take on an important inhibitory role in early development, constraining approach and aggression, and contributing to the development of conscience. This may seem surprising, in that fear is often viewed as a maladaptive emotion. From an evolutionary point of view, however, fearful inhibition can protect the individual from approaching potentially harmful objects or situations. It must nevertheless be noted that the fearful form of inhibitory control remains a relatively reactive process that can be easily elicited by situational cues. In the course of development, this system may lead to rigid and overcontrolled patterns of behavior that can limit the individual's positive experiences with the world (Block & Block, 1980; Kremen & Block, 1998). Fortunately, temperament involves additional forms of control that provide greater efficiency and flexibility than that afforded by fear. We study these forms in the assessment of effortful control. Effortful Control Beyond the inhibitory control provided by fear, effortful control systems related to attention make a crucial contribution to temperament. Individuals can voluntarily deploy their attention, allowing them to regulate their more reactive tendencies, and to suppress a dominant response in order to perform a subdominant response. For example, in situations requiring delay, the child can disengage attention from the rewarding properties of the stimulus, resisting temptation and delaying gratification. Thus, individual differences in attention influence children's capacity to suppress their more reactive tendencies, to take in additional sources of information, and to plan and execute efficient strategies for coping. As mentioned above, our factor analyses of the CBQ identified a general factor of Effortful Control (attentional shifting, attentional focusing, inhibitory control, perceptual sensitivity) distinct from the Surgency and Negative Emotionality Factors (Ahadi et al., 1993). We have also found intercorrelations among attentional focusing, attentional shifting, and inhibitory control in adults (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1988). In U.S. adult as well as child

10 Temperament in Children Page 10 samples, effortful control measures are not related to measures of positive emotionality, but are inversely related to negative emotionality Effortful control includes the ability to inhibit a dominant response in order to perform a subdominant response, to detect errors and to engage in planning. In our lab and others (Kochanska, et al., 2000), study of the development of effortful control in young children has been particularly exciting. In addition, we have used model tasks related to brain function to assess the executive attention capacities likely to underlie effortful control (Posner & Rothbart, 1998). A basic assay of executive attention is the Stroop task. The original form of the Stroop task required subjects to report the color of ink a word was written in, when the color word, e. g. blue, might conflict with the color of ink, e.g. red. We know from adult brain imaging studies that Stroop tasks activate a midline brain structure that is also associated with other executive attention activities in the anterior cingulate. In a meta analysis of imaging studies, an area of the anterior cingulate was found to be activated in cognitive conflict tasks in variants of the Stroop task (Bush, Luu, & Posner, 2000). An adjacent area of the anterior cingulate was found to be activated by emotional tasks and emotional states. When the effortful control area was activated, the emotion area tended to be de-activated and vice-versa, suggesting the possibility of reciprocal effortful and emotional controls of attention. At Oregon, we have recently used a marker task to assess executive attention (Gerardi- Caulton, 2000; Posner & Rothbart, 1998) in which the child must respond to a spatially conflicting stimulus by inhibiting the dominant response and executing a subdominant response. Performance on this task improves considerably between 27 and 36 months, with older children showing less perseveration of the previous response. Children who perform well are described by their parents as more skilled at attentional shifting and focusing, less impulsive, and less prone to frustration reactions. Using a very similar task with adults, individuals who performed poorly tended to be high in anxiety and low on self-reported attentional control (Derryberry & Reed, 1998). These findings are consistent with the idea that effortful attention, measured through questionnaire or laboratory methods, may help individuals constrain negative forms of emotion. In two large longitudinal studies (32 to 66 months and 9 to 45 months), Kochanska and her colleagues have assessed five skills involving the capacity to suppress a dominant response in order to perform a subdominant response (Kochanska, Murray, Jacques, Koenig & Vandegeest, 1996; Kochanska, Murray & Coy, 1997; Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000). These include: delaying (e.g., waiting for candy displayed under a transparent cup), slowing down motor activity (drawing a line slowly), flexibly suppressing and initiating response to changing signals (go-no-go games), effortful attention (recognizing small shapes hidden within a dominant large shape), and lowering the voice. Batteries were designed for developmental periods ranging from 22 to 66 months. Beginning at age 2½, children's performance was highly consistent across tasks, indicating they all appeared to measure a common underlying quality that had developed over time. Children were also remarkably stable across time, with correlations across repeated assessments varying from.44 for the youngest children (22 to 33 months) to.59 from 32 to 46 months, to.65 from 46 to 66 months (Kochanska et al., 2000). In Oregon, 6-7 year olds high in effortful control were found to be high in empathy, guilt/shame, and low in aggressiveness. Eisenberg and her colleagues have also found that 4 to

11 Temperament in Children Page 11 6-year old boys with good attentional control tend to deal with anger by using nonhostile verbal methods rather than overt aggressive methods (Eisenberg, Fabes, Nyman, Bernzweig, & Pinulas, 1994). Effortful control may support empathy by allowing attention to the thoughts and feelings of another without becoming overwhelmed by one's own distress. Similarly, guilt/shame in 6-7 year olds is positively related to effortful control and negative affectivity (Rothbart et al., 1994). Negative affectivity may contribute to guilt by providing strong internal cues of discomfort, increasing the probability that the cause of these feelings is attributed to an internal rather than external cause (Dienstbier, 1984; Kochanska, 1993). Effortful control may contribute further by providing the flexibility needed to notice these feelings and relate them to feelings of responsibility for one's own specific actions and the negative consequences for another (Derryberry & Reed, 1994; Derryberry & Reed, 1996). Consistent with these relationships, effortful control also appears to play an important role in the development of conscience. As noted above, the internalization of moral principles appears to be facilitated in fearful preschool-aged children, especially when their mothers use gentle discipline (Kochanska, 1991, 1995, 1997). In addition, internalized control is greater in children high in effortful control (Kochanska, et al., 1996, 1997, 2000). Again, we see the influence of two separable control systems regulating the development of conscience. While fear may provide reactive inhibition and strong negative affect for association with moral principles, effortful control provides the attentional flexibility required to link negative affect, action, and moral principles. What does effortful control mean for temperament and development? It means that unlike early theoretical models of temperament that stressed the way we are moved by our positive and negative emotions or level of arousal, we are not always at the mercy of affect. Using effortful control, we can more flexibly approach situations we fear and inhibit actions we desire. Again, however, the efficiency of control will depend on the strength of the emotional processes against which effort is exerted. Temperament, Personality, and Neuroscience We have recently revised the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart, 1981), taking advantage of recent advances in understanding of the structure of temperament in older children (Gartstein & Rothbart, 2001). In doing so, we have also been able to explore an affiliativeness construct that may prove to be related to later personality agreeableness by using a cuddliness measure. The emerging structure of temperament in infancy as reflected in factor analysis includes two factors very similar to those in the CBQ data the first appears to assess surgency/extraversion with scale loadings from Activity Level, Approach, Smiling and Laughter, High Intensity Pleasure, Perceptual Sensitivity, and Vocal Reactivity. The second is a negative affectivity factor, with loadings from Sadness, Frustration, Falling Reactivity (negative loading), and Fear, although Fear has very low loadings on this factor and could form a separate factor. We have also extracted a factor that includes Cuddliness, Soothability, Duration of Orienting, and Low Intensity Pleasure, which is positively related to surgency and negatively related to negative affectivity. One is tempted to say that this factor s organization reflects the same broad dimension of effortful control we see later in childhood, but at least early in infancy, we would expect the two attentional systems to be quite different. In infancy, we are studying more reactive duration of orienting. Later, more regulative effortful control will have developed.

12 Temperament in Children Page 12 Nevertheless, in both the IBQ-R and CBQ for US samples, the attentional factors are negatively related to negative affectivity, suggesting attentional control of emotion. Finding this structure of temperament in infancy and childhood is important to the field. Again, as we have seen for the CBQ, temperament appears to involve individual differences in basic emotions and their related motor tendencies as well as individual differences in attention. Second, the systems identified are phylogenetically ancient ones. They are evolutionarily conserved systems that have yielded important basic research with animals and adult imaging studies. They also show the possibility of links with the Big 5 factors of personality. Temperament Dimension Related Neural Structures / Neurochemicals Adult Personality Approach/ Surgency Fear Irritability/ Anger Orienting Effortful Control Affiliation Basolateral Amygdala VTA, Nucleus Accumbens, Dopamine Lateral & Central Amygdala, Hippocampus, Norepinephrine, Serotonin Approach circuits, Ventromedial Hypothalamus, Periacqueductal Gray, Dopamine Superior Colliculus, Pulvinar (Thalamus), Parietal Lobe, Norepinephrine Mid Prefrontal Structures including Anterior Cingulate, Motor Cortex, Dopamine Amygdala, Ventromedial Hypothalamus, Opiates Extraversion Neuroticism/ Anxiety Neuroticism/ Disagreeableness Openness Constraint/ Conscientiousness Agreeableness Figure 3: Neuropsychology of temperament and personality. (Adapted from Rothbart, Derryberry, & Posner, 1994; Derryberry & Rothbart, 1997.) In Figure 3, we have pulled together, on the left side, dimensions of temperament; in the middle column, neurocircuits and neurochemical pathways that have been identified in animal research, and in the right column, broad dimensions of the Big 5 personality factors related to these temperament dimensions. Although this table was originally hypothetical, we have now carried out research on adult self-reported temperament and Big 5 that has demonstrated strong positive correlations between the hypothesized temperament and personality dimensions,

13 Temperament in Children Page 13 including links between orienting and openness and effortful control and conscientiousness (Evans & Rothbart, 2000; Rothbart, Ahadi, et al., 2000). An understanding of affective neuroscience also has promoted increasing use of physiological assays of emotion. In the laboratory, investigators are now using heart rate measures of parasympathetic nervous system activity in vagal tone (Porges et al., 1996), measures of sympathetic nervous system activity in the pre-ejection heart period, or PEP (Uchino et al., 1995), assays of cortisol secretion to get at general stress reactivity (Stansbury & Gunnar, 1994), and EEG asymmetry and imaging measures (Sutton & Davidson, 1997) to get at approach versus fear. Potentiated startle (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1998) also provides an excellent model assay for the fear system. Future Research The future of the study of temperament in childhood is bright. We have long known from behavior genetics studies the strong heritable contributions to temperament. Now, exciting developments in the mapping of the human genome are allowing us to look at relationships between variability in specific genes and temperament at different points in the developmental process. This work on infants has begun by Auerbach and Ebstein and their associates in Israel (Auerbach, et al., 1998; Ebstein, et al., 1998). We expect that this research, along with additional imaging studies and the development of further model tasks will provide important links to temperament. We envision moving toward bridging research on temperament in childhood with that on personality in adulthood (Caspi, 1998) within a coherent framework on individual differences. Establishing these links should not be too difficult, because the study of adult temperament is another active and highly integrative area (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985; Gray & McNaughton, 1996; Zuckerman, 1991). To accomplish this task, however, we need to continue to develop the general theory of temperament. In our view (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1997), temperament involves organized systems rather than separate traits, and includes both emotional and attentional processes. Considering these processes in concert allows a much richer view of development, not only during childhood but also across adulthood. The empirical and conceptual examination of continuity and change within systems as well as developmentally changing links among the systems is another very important goal. Pathways between early temperament and future personality outcomes will of necessity be complex, because child development unfolds in the context of social relationships, and continuity and change cannot be understood without considering the effects of social experience. To understand developmental pathways, we will need to disentangle complex interaction effects among early temperament predispositions, socialization processes, relationships, and culture. We can expect that reactive and self-regulative aspects of temperament will increasingly be applied to questions about social and personality development and the development of psychopathology, as we move into the next four growth decades of temperament research.

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