1.12.5 Temperament, character and personality

Individual temperamental differences

Temperament, character and personality

Temperament is the stylistic "how" of a child's behaviour, as distinct from its content (the "what") and its motivation (the "why").

• Temperament is biologically based, heritable (estimates of 20 to 60%) and moderately stable from early childhood into later life.

• Persistence is temperament, while what a child persists at reflects character.

The New York Longitudinal Study

Thomas and Chess did the foundational work on temperament in the New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS), interviewing parents from the child's infancy. Their work is separate from the attachment research of Bowlby and Ainsworth.

Nine dimensions

Three clusters

• About 35% of children fitted none of the three clusters, so only about 65% were classified.

• Irregularity marks the difficult child, so regular waking, eating and bowel habits rule this cluster out.

• The slow-to-warm-up child differs from the difficult child in intensity: mild reactions rather than intense, fiery ones.

• The clusters group continuous traits, and "difficult" describes a pattern, not a fixed outcome.

Goodness of fit

Goodness of fit is Thomas and Chess's idea that developmental outcome depends on the match between the child's temperament and the demands of the environment, not on either alone.

• An active child may struggle with long seated tasks but manage with short tasks and movement breaks.

Other temperament models

• Buss and Plomin's EAS temperaments appear early, are heritable, have an evolutionary basis and are stable into adulthood.

• Behavioural inhibition in toddlers raises the risk of later anxiety disorder, especially social anxiety, but most inhibited children never develop one.

Later outcomes and developmental timing

• Longer waiting in childhood delay-of-gratification tasks is associated with better later academic achievement and better social, behavioural and health outcomes.

• Heterotypic continuity means psychopathology persists across development while its diagnostic form changes, so an earlier disorder predicts a different later one.

• Homotypic continuity means the same diagnosis persists.

• A sensitive period explains why the same adversity disrupts different developmental domains depending on the age at which it occurs.

• Multifinality only names the finding that one exposure leads to divergent outcomes.

Personality

Basic terms

Personality is a relatively enduring, organised pattern of thinking, feeling and behaviour.

• Assess personality when the person is well, because current illness can resemble enduring traits.

History

• Julius Koch introduced "psychopathic inferiority" in the early 1890s, an early forerunner of personality disorder.

• Moral insanity was Prichard's term, and psychopathic personality was Schneider's, about three decades after Koch.

Nomothetic and idiographic approaches

Allport's trait theory

Gordon Allport founded trait theory and ranked traits at three levels.

Eysenck's PEN model

Eysenck described three independent, biologically based, largely heritable dimensions: psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism.

• The Eysenck Personality Inventory is a structured self-report questionnaire that measures extraversion-introversion and neuroticism-stability, plus a lie scale.

• The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire adds psychoticism.

Five-factor model

The five-factor model (Big Five, OCEAN) of Costa and McCrae has five broad domains: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Narrower facets sit beneath each domain.

• Psychoticism belongs to Eysenck's model and is not a Big Five domain; extraversion and neuroticism appear in both.

• A person high in both conscientiousness and agreeableness suits a structured, task-based therapy such as cognitive behavioural therapy, with its agenda and homework, rather than exploratory short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Behaviour-pattern types

• Negative affectivity is a broad inward tendency to worry, gloom and irritability, which is what separates Type D from the outward hostility of Type A.

Psychoanalytic ideas

• In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud treated slips, forgetting and bungled actions (parapraxes) as expressions of unconscious material.

• Freud's later dual-instinct theory sets the life instinct (Eros) against the death instinct (Thanatos).

Other approaches

Personality tests

Objective inventories

• The MMPI is empirically keyed: items were kept because they separated diagnostic groups, whatever their content.

• Its clinical scales are named after syndromes, such as psychopathic deviate and paranoia, and its validity scales detect faking good or bad.

• The NEO Personality Inventory of Costa and McCrae measures the five-factor model, splitting each of the five domains into six facets.

Projective tests

• The Rorschach test uses symmetrical, contentless inkblots scored for location, determinants such as colour and movement, and content.

• The Rorschach is the least structured common test, allowing the widest range of responses.

• In the Thematic Apperception Test, the person tells a story about each ambiguous picture of people, and motives, needs and conflicts are inferred from the themes.

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Premorbid intelligence

• The National Adult Reading Test estimates premorbid intelligence: irregular words cannot be sounded out, so reading them depends on earlier familiarity, which survives early dementia.