Chapter 9

Personality Development:
Alternative Views
Temperament

What Is Temperament?
https://youtu.be/GjTUKvnR-HE

A– Thomas and Chess: the Goodness-of-fit model.

• Easy child/Difficult child/Slow to warm up child
• Patterns tend to persist into later childhood keeping in mind the environment

B– Buss and Plomin

• Activity level/Emotionality (primarily negative emotionality)/Sociability

C– Jerome Kagan
• Behavioral inhibition (shyness)

None of these are universally accepted

 An Emerging Concensus
5 key dimensions of temperament

1. Activity level – tendency to move often and vigorously, rather

than to remain passive or immobile
2. Approach/positive emotionality –tendency to move toward
rather than away from new people, situations, or objects
3. Inhibition and anxiety – tendency to respond to with fear or
to withdraw from new people, situations, or objects
4. Negative emotionality/irritability/anger – low threshold for
frustration
5. Effortful control/task persistence – ability to stay focused, to
manage attention and effort
 The Big Five Personality Traits
https://youtu.be/IB1FVbo8TSs

Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,

Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN)
• Cross-cultural studies support the five dimensions
for adult personalities
• Tend to be stable traits
• Validity is strengthened by linking scores to behavior
in a wide variety of life situations
• Research suggests the Big Five provide a good
description of personality structure in late childhood
and adolescence
 Is temperament another word for personality?

• Rothbart and Bates define temperament as:

“Individual differences in emotional, motor, and
attentional reactivity and selfregulation” that children
consistently display in all kinds of settings and situations
• Temperament
– Is the emotional substrate of personality
– May represent the basic pattern of personality
• Personality in later life:
A combination of the basic pattern and myriad life
experiences
 Genetic and Biological Explanations of Personality
Biological Theory of Personality
https://youtu.be/ST2zgtoM6K8

The biological argument

Proposition 1: Each individual is born with genetically
determined characteristic patterns of responding to
the environment and to other people

– Strong evidence to support this

• Identical twins studies
• Non-twin siblings are far more similar than expected
Proposition 2: Genetic differences operate via variations in
fundamental physiological processes
• Reactivity of underlying neural systems
• Kagan –differences in threshold levels of the amygdala and
hypothalamus
• Differences in activity levels of the left and right hemispheres

Proposition 3: Temperamental dispositions persist through

childhood and into adulthood
• Create a bias toward particular behaviors
• Mixed but growing support for proposition 3
• Inhibited toddlers in Kagan’s study were less likely than
uninhibited peers to be rated as highly aggressive or
delinquent at age 11
Proposition 4: Temperamental characteristics interact
with the child’s environment in ways that may either
strengthen or modify the basic temperamental
pattern
• The extent to which parents direct the behavior of
their
children and express warmth towards them affects
positive affect and approach
• Personality develops through interaction between
the child’s temperamental tendencies and the
environment the child encounters or creates
• Tendency for parents to respond differently to
children with different temperaments
 Critique of the biological argument

1- Continuing lack of agreement on the basic

dimensions of temperament

2- Many biologically oriented theories have not been

developmental theories
 Learning Theory
Social learning theories of personality
Behavioral Theory - Nature vs Nurture
Personality?
https://youtu.be/9NG-0eBqJSQ
https://youtu.be/RhVziGVkOeI

1- Classical Conditioning - Ivan Pavlov

– Influences emotional responses
2- Operant Conditioning – B.F. Skinner
– Operant conditioning: Positive reinforcement; Negative reinforcement;
Punishment
3- Social Cognitive Theory – Albert Bandura
– Observational learning or modeling
• Can be used for learning both abstract concepts and concrete skills
• Intrinsic reinforcement
• Internal reinforcers such as pride

Does not indicate developmental changes that accompany age

 PROPOSITIONS OF THE LEARNING THEORISTS
• Behavior is strengthened by reinforcement
• Behavior that is reinforced on partial schedules
should be even stronger and more resistant to
extinction than behavior that is consistently
reinforced
• Children learn new behaviors largely through
modeling
• From reinforcement and modeling, children learn
not only overt behavior but also ideas, expectations,
internal standards, and self-concepts
 Critique of Learning Models
Learning theories can explain either consistency or inconsistency in children’s
behaviors
• Learning theorists are optimistic about the possibility of change; whereas
the Biological theories are pessimistic
– Both have support but biology is correct for extremes of personality

• Learning theory gives an accurate picture of the way in which many specific
behaviors are learned
• Bandura’s cognitive elements add strength
– Concept of self-scheme or self-concept

YET
• Learning theories place too much emphasis on what happens to the child
and not enough on what the child does with the information
• Learning theories are not developmental
• Behavior is governed by unconscious as well as
conscious processes.
• Personality structure develops over time, as a result of
interaction between the child’s inborn drives and needs
and the responses of the key people in the child’s world.
• Development of personality is fundamentally stage-like,
with each stage centered on a particular task or a
particular basic need
• The specific personality a child develops depends on the
degree of success the child has in moving through the
various stages
1- Sigmund Freud
• Psychosexual stages
• Children are influenced by sexual drives
• Children must overcome the stages successfully whereby a
moderate level of frustration is required
• Psychosexual stages: Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency Period, and Genital

2- Eric Erikson
• Psychosocial stages
• Children are influenced by cultural demands that are age related
• Children must interact in a positive way with the environment for a
healthy personality to form
• Psychosocial Stages: Trust versus Mistrust, Autonomy vs.
Shame/doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt, Industry vs. Inferiority, Identity vs.
Role Confusion, Intimacy vs. Isolation, Generativity vs. Stagnation,
Ego Integrity vs. Despair
 Some Differences Between Freud &Erikson

Freud
– Cognitive skills develop to obtain gratification
– Physical maturation more important

• Erikson
– Cognitive skills are part of a set of ego functions that
develop independently
– Acknowledges maturation but emphasizes shifts in
the demands of the social environment
 Evidence and Applications of the Psychoanalytic Theory

Empirical explorations of Freud and Erikson are rare

and difficult to perform, yet:

– 4- or 5-year-olds are more likely to show

affectionate behavior to the opposite parent and
show aggressive and antagonistic behavior toward the
same-sex parent
 Critique of Psychoanalytic Theory

+ Provides a better account of the complexities of

personality development
+ Focuses on the emotional qualities of the child
caregiver relationship
+ Helpful concepts such as defense mechanisms and
identification

- Greatest weakness is the fuzziness of the concepts

- Not a precise theory of development