Describe how temperament has been defined and studied by developmental psychologists. With reference to relevant research and theory, discuss the relationship between children's temperament and their early development.

• the nomothetic approach sought to measure the quantitative differences between individuals on a common set of traits or dimensions, of which temperament was considered to be one component;
• the idiographic approach sought to identify the distinctive and unique combination of qualitative characteristics that would engender specific behavioural tendencies in the individual child.

The idiographic approach - with its emphasis on the behaviour of the individual - has proved useful in such areas as the treatment of phobias in behavioural therapy. Nevertheless the nomothetic, quantitative approach – based upon the scientific method of the observation and measurement of variables - has dominated subsequent psychological research into individual differences in this area. In turn such research has sought to 'deconstruct' children's individual characteristic early behaviour by identifying, quantifying and typifying its underlying component independent traits or characteristics and their causes, giving rise to the view that a small number of broad, fundamental temperamental dimensions can be recognised and described. Bates (1989) identified these as:

Emotional responses: including general quality of mood; reaction to the unfamiliar; tolerance of, and response to internal states.

Attentional orientation patterns: i.e. ‘comfortability’ when distressed; ease of distraction from an activity.

Motor activity: vigour and frequency of activity; ‘appropriate’ modification of activities.

        Researchers subsequently have sought to measure and compare differences between children in these broad temperamental dimensions. However, for such measurements to have any validity, it is essential that the characteristic behaviour in question can be shown to possess stability – i.e. that the individual child’s behaviour is expressed regularly over a long period of time – and continuity, a term which denotes that an individual differences in particular behavioural characteristics remains consistently linked to another behavioural characteristic in the same child at different ages. These elements both contribute to the notion that temperament contributes to regularity and coherence in a child’s behavioural patterns over both time and in different situations. In any case, it is important to bear in mind that a ‘normal’ developing child will display an increasingly sophisticated and diverse temperamental range of behaviour characteristics (in such aspects as behavioural inhibition and effortful control) particularly in the first few years of life during which individual differences between children’s temperaments develop and/or become more discernible.

The difficulties in defining (and therefore, appropriately measuring) ‘temperament’ have seen various, in some senses competing, theories put forward to explain its structure and organisation. Whereas all of these would most probably acknowledge temperament’s ‘biological rootedness’ (i.e. due for example to variation in central nervous system structure and function) a point of issue appears to be over the extent to which characteristics are seen by some theorists as being composed or influenced more by genetic differences between children (temperamental heritability) than by differences in the social environments experienced by children – in essence a reflection of the classic nature/nurture dichotomy. While the early existence in a child of a temperamental characteristic is not in itself proof that the characteristic is biologically-rooted, it is generally agreed that the temperamental construct could be applied to those features of individual behavioural differences that manifest themselves early in life.

Amongst the more influential pieces of work in efforts to understand temperament was the New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS) (Thomas and Chess 1977). The two child psychiatrists developed a complex nine-dimensional framework to describe children’s temperament over a wide age range. In addition, they suggested that three temperamental types – the ‘easy’ child; the ‘slow to warm up’ child; and the ‘difficult’ child – could be identified early in infancy, and, most controversially, suggested links between this early ‘difficult’ temperament and later behavioural problems. However, as the basis for the categorisation of a child within the NYLS schema was the mother’s perception, description and rating of her child’s temperament in questionnaires and on checklists - with such perception quite probably subject to distortion and/or bias (or, at best, influence) based both on the mother’s own personality, and on the quality of her relationship with her child – a question mark hangs over the study’s validity as an accurate measurement of a child’s temperament, and over its complexity.

An alternative, and less complex, framework for classifying temperamental differences based on both laboratory studies and analyses of questionnaire data (similar to classical psychometric tests), was developed by Buss and Plomin (1984). They proposed the existence of three temperamental dimensions – Emotionality, Activity and Sociability (EAS) – possibly augmented by Impulsivity and Shyness – which could account for most variations in temperament. Buss and Plomin sought to identify traits that were evident early in the child’s life and were strongly genetically influenced, and which could be identified through statistical procedures, relating their work to Hans Eysenk’s (1981) theories regarding the development of the adult personality. Nevertheless in essence the approach, as with Thomas and Chess, is a quantitative dimensional one which views temperamental differences between individuals as to a greater or lesser extent biologically inherent, and varying merely in degree on a continuum. Once again, as the determination of these differences through the use of questionnaires may be susceptible to ‘rater bias’. In contrast, the work of Jerome Kagan (1988) in the study of social inhibition supports the view that, while still genetically-derived, there exists qualitative distinctions between stable temperament category types or ‘profiles’, such differences resulting from measurable physiological variations in the biological mechanism, specifically in the limbic system of the brain.

One criticism of all three approaches outlined above is that they seem to underplay the importance of context in determining behaviour, ascribing perhaps too much to biologically-derived differences in temperament (‘nature’) and not enough to the social environments (‘nurture’) of the children in question, and in particular, to the quality of a child’s relationship with other people. Dunn and Kendrick’s (1982, p.98) studies of the behavioural reactions of children to the arrival of a newborn in the family led them to the view that “temperamental differences must be viewed as closely bound up with differences in children’s relationships with their mothers.” In their view, the stability of such relationships will greatly influence the consistency of the child’s behaviour when with the other person or people in question. Dunn and Kendrick’s position - that much human behaviour is context-dependent - is the exception in the four approaches outlined here, the others maintaining the consensus referred to in the previous section of this report that temperament is, by definition, the expression of consistent behavioural style(s) in a variety of context-independent circumstances.

How might temperament affect children's interaction with the world?

Researchers have sought to establish how, temperamental differences impact upon the actual experiences and subsequent maturation of the individual child, primarily by investigating associations between temperamental differences and variations both in cognitive and social development. One area of research has been on the direct effect of temperament on development: Tizard and Hughes (1984), for example, have noted that impulsive children with short attention spans are likely to experience early learning difficulties due to poor behavioural control and responsivity; while Keogh (1992) has explored the relationship between academic achievement and temperamental characteristics such as ‘Task Orientation’, ‘Personal-Social Flexibility’ and ‘Reactivity’. Another area of research looks at the direct effect of child temperament on parents, with an emerging paradigm portraying the child as more of an active agent of its own development. This research has given rise to a transactional model of development, in which a child is portrayed as being the primary producer of its own experiences, through both its choice of activities, and the influence of its behaviour upon parents/adult carers.  

An interesting concept that has emerged in studies of the indirect relationship between a child’s temperament and its development is that of goodness of fit, which essentially is premised upon a comparison between the individual temperament characteristics of the child and the personality of the adult carer, to determine how well these match or ‘fit’ together. A ‘good fit’ would be taken to lead to a more beneficial environment within which the child will positively interact, adjust and develop (Lerner et al., 1989) Indeed this goodness of fit concept need not be limited to the relationship between the child and its carers, but could, I believe, be extended to explore the relationship between the child’s temperament and its personal development within its entire socio-cultural (and economic?!) milieu. In any case, it should be remembered that the ‘child-centred’ transactional paradigm is not the sole model of social development: socialisation places the accumulative, regulatory influence of adults at the centre of the development experience; social learning theory, on the other hand, sees development occurring primarily through the imitation by the child of the behaviour of those adults to whom it is repeatedly exposed. Both models suggest for the child a much more passive, receptive role in its own social development than does the transactional model and neither seems to give much consideration to the temperament of the child as a determining force in this process.

Conclusion

In this report, we have pursued a definition of  ‘temperament’ and discussed theoretical approaches to the concept and its assessment, before offering a short critical review of four theories of temperament. We then went on to consider how temperament might affect children's interaction with the world, drawing attention to theories such as ‘goodness of fit’ and the ‘transactional model’ of temperamental development. From the evidence offered here, it seems reasonable to conclude that an individual child’s temperament is to some extent genetically or/and biologically determined, and that the individual’s temperament will direct him/her to seek the experiences or express the behaviour to which s/he is thus in part predisposed. These temperamental displays in turn provoke reactions from significant adults which may either challenge or reinforce such behavioural choices. These reactions again in turn impact upon the continued development of the child either through the reward, encouragement and reinforcement of the temperamental characteristic or alternatively, in the face of a negative reaction, perhaps to its sublimation and repression. Nature and nurture are most likely both at work in the creation of the temperamental framework (and future personality) of the child, who, while he may sit, it would seem, at the centre of this transactional developmental process, is neither entirely a biological slave to, nor a self-directing master of, his own temperamental destiny.