19.2: Overview of Temperament

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Amanda Taintor

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Overview

It is estimated that 40–60% of the observed variability in personality is due to temperament characteristics or traits (Cloninger et al., 1993; Bouchard, 1994; Loehlin et al., 1998; Robins, 2005) ( Fisher, Island, Rich, Marchalik, and Brown 2015). Temperamental traits are biologically based characteristics present early in life that contribute to individual differences in regulating and modulating emotion, attention, behavior, and motor activity (Rothbart, 1981, 2007; Gartstein and Rothbart, 2003) (Spinelli, Fasolo, Shah, Genovese and Aureli, 2018). Temperament is an inherited pattern of cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior; it is influenced by experience (Terracciano et al., 2005; Roberts and Mroczek, 2008) but is mainly stable across the lifespan (Bouchard, 1994; McCrae et al., 2000; Roberts and DelVecchio, 2000). According to Rothbart et al. (2000), “temperament arises from our genetic endowment. It influences and is influenced by the individual's experience, one of the outcomes is the adult personality." Although some theorists argue that there is no rigid distinction between personality and temperament (McCrae et al., 2000), elements of temperament traditionally include behavioral dispositions from childhood to adulthood, observable in preverbal infants and generalizable to non-human animals (Rothbart et al., 2000; Clark, 2005) ) ( Fisher, Island, Rich, Marchalik, and Brown 2015). Because development emerges through bidirectional interactions between the infant and his environment (Sameroff, 1975), temperament can influence how the infant receives and responds to stimuli in his environment, impacting subsequent development.[1]

[1] Fisher HE, Island HD, Rich J, Marchalik D and Brown LL (2015) Four broad temperament dimensions: doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01098 is licensed CC BY