Lezioni di differenze individuali nel temperaemento e personalità (parte prima)

A Definition of Temperament

Gordon Allport (1961) defined temperament as "the characteristic phenomena of an individual's emotional nature, including his susceptibility to emotional stimulation, his customary strength and speed of response, the quality of his prevailing mood, these phenomena being regarded as dependent upon constitutional make-up and, therefore, largely hereditary in origin".

Allport's definition focused on individual differences in emotional reactivity. Thomas and Chess (1977), however, took a broader approach to temperament, including individual differences in attention and activity level. Taking into account both of these approaches, we have defined temperament as constitutionally based individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation, in the domains of affect, activity, and attention.

The term "constitutional" refers to the biological bases of temperament, influenced over time by heredity, maturation, and

Experience and self-regulation are umbrella terms that broadly organize the temperament domain. Reactivity refers to responsiveness to change in the external and internal environment. Reactivity includes a broad range of reactions (e.g., the emotions of fear, cardiac reactivity) and more general tendencies (e.g., negative emotionality), thus it is not limited to general reactivity.

Temperament describes tendencies or dispositions that are not continually expressed but require appropriate eliciting conditions.

Temperament and Personality

Temperament represents the affective, activational, and attentional core of personality, whereas personality includes much more than temperament, particularly the content of thought, skills, habits, values, morals, beliefs, and social cognition. Social cognition includes the perception of the self, others, and the relation of self to objects, events, and others. Over time, social cognition becomes increasingly important in eliciting and moderating temperamental.

Personality traits have been defined as patterns of thoughts, emotion, and behavior that show consistency across situations and stability over time, and that "affect the individual's getting along with other people and with himself".

Temperament traits similarly show consistency across situations and stability over time, but they are limited to basic processes of reactivity and self-regulation, and do not include the specific content of thought or the use of conceptually based defences (e.g., paranoia).

HISTORY OF TEMPERAMENT: RESEARCH ON CHILDHOOD

Several lines of inquiry have contributed to contemporary temperament research on children. One is the research of the normative child psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s, who observed large numbers of children to establish the normal sequences of motor and mental development and studied small samples of children intensively over time. In doing so, they noted striking temperamental variability among the children they observed.

Outcomes may occur for children with similar temperamental traits, and children differing in temperament may come to similar developmental outcomes via different pathways (Kochanska, 1995).

A second major line of research on temperament in childhood came from biologically oriented clinicians. Bergman and Escalona (1949) identified children who were particularly reactive to low intensities of stimulation in one or more sensory modalities. In Escalona's (1968) ground-breaking book, The Roots of Individuality, she proposed "effective experience," the concept of the idea that events in children's lives are experienced only as they are filtered through the individual child's nervous system. A given event will thus differ in its effects for children who differ in temperament.

Inspired by differences among their own children, Chess and Thomas studied "primary reaction patterns," individual differences in what they called the collecting interviews.

from parents of infants on repeated occasions. Beginning when their initial sample of 22 infants was 3 to 6 months of age, parents were extensively interviewed about their infants' behavior in varying contexts. Each infant reaction and its context was then typed on a separate sheet of paper, and Birch inductively sorted the descriptions into categories that came to represent the nine NYLS temperament dimensions. (1) Activity Level, (2) Approach/ Withdrawal, (3) Adaptability, (4) Mood, (5) Threshold, (6) Intensity, (7) Distractibility, (8) Rhythmicity, and (9) Attention Span / Persistence. Later, Michael Rutter suggested the term temperament to describe their area of study, and this term was adopted by the NYLS group.

Acceptance of Temperament Research Finally, cognitive approaches stressed children's influences on their own development via their perceptual and cognitive mental representations of events (Kohlberg, 1969). Research on temperament would now introduce the idea that,