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Thomas, Chess and colleagues identified nine temperament dimensions: activity level, rhythmicity, approach-withdrawal, adaptability, threshold, intensity, mood, distractibility and attention span-persistence. A revised list reflecting subsequent research includes extraversion or surgency, which is related to positive affect, activity level, impulsivity and risk-taking; negative affectivity, which is related to fear, anger, sadness and discomfort; and effortful control, which is related to attention shifting and focusing, perceptual sensitivity, and inhibitory and activational control. These last three dimensions have been found consistently in parent reports of temperament in early and middle childhood.
Temperament also develops over time. During the first few months of life, individual differences can be observed in attentional orienting, distress proneness, positive affect and approach, and frustration. Late in the first year and beyond, there may be individual differences in fearful inhibition to novel or intense stimuli. Some infants who previously responded rapidly to new objects or people may now approach more slowly, or not approach at all. It is also late in the first year of life that children begin to develop effortful control.
Children’s temperaments shape their outcomes, in part by forming the ways that children engage and evoke responses from their environments. Children interpret their environmental experiences differently depending on their temperaments. For example, anxious and irritable children tend to perceive negative events as more threatening than do children with a lower level of negative emotions.
It is clear that effortful control is linked to positive development, even in the first five years of life. For example, laboratory or parent-report measures of toddlers’ and preschoolers’ effortful control have been associated with lower levels of problem behaviours. In addition, young children’s effortful control has been found to correlate with and predict low levels of negative emotion, highly committed compliance, high levels of social competence, and conscience. Effortful control also plays a role in the responses evoked. As children grow, they are increasingly held responsible for their own behaviour; children who are not well regulated are therefore likely to elicit negative reactions from both peers and adults.
Links have also been identified between temperament and the development of psychopathology. Temperament may heighten responses to stressful events or buffer against risk. Relationships have been found between temperamental fearful inhibition and later anxiety, negative affectivity and depression. Extraversion/surgency and low effortful control have also been associated with the development of behaviour problems.
Yet while there is consensus that temperament is shaped by biological processes, recent research with infant twin pairs has made it clear that children’s individual differences are shaped by environmental experiences as well, even during infancy. Different parenting strategies may help to augment or diminish certain aspects of a child’s temperament. Beyond the family environment, children’s school environment, peer relationships and neighbourhoods can also have a major impact on whether children’s early temperaments remain stable and on whether their temperaments lead to good or poor outcomes.
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