Our ___ changes our experience of the surroundings that we’re in.
Temperament
What is Temperament?
Reflects a child’s behavioural style and characteristic way of approaching/responding to the world
Temperament is relatively ___ over time
stable
At what age do you start to see Temperament become much more stable and much more predictive of your childhood and adulthood Temperament?
Beyond 3 or so years old
What are Thomas & Chess’s 4 categories of Temperament?
Easy Babies, Difficult Babies, Slow-to-Warm-up Babies, & Did not Fit Category
What % were categorized as Easy Babies?
40%
What % were categorized as Difficult Babies?
10%
What % were categorized as Slow-to-Warm-up Babies?
15%
What % were categorized as Did not Fit Category Babies?
35%
What are the characteristics of Easy Babies?
- Adjust readily to new situations
- Quickly establish daily routines
- Generally cheerful and easy to calm
- Go with the flow
What are the characteristics of Difficult Babies?
- Slow to adjust to new experiences
- Get overwhelmed easily by changes to routine, by new stimuli or situations that are unfamiliar, and tend to react with strong negative responses
- Tend to react negatively and intensely to novel stimuli
- Have a hard time to establish routines
- Struggle to adapt to new experiences
What are the characteristics of Slow-to-Warm-up Babies?
- Might look close to the difficult babies at first when encountering a new situation
- Struggle with new situations and don’t adapt quite as easily as the easy babies
- They react to new situations with a mild negative reaction
- Somewhat difficult at first, but become easier over time after repeated contact with new objects, people, and situations
What is the benefit of Thomas & Chess’s Early Classifications of Temperament?
These categories are a good way of quickly and efficiently describing the basic temperamental pattern that a given child shows
True or False: You can simultaneously experience both positive & negative emotions strongly and intensely
True
What are the characteristics of Positive Emotionality (& Surgency)?
- Differences in children’s positive affect (frequency of smiling & laughter; willingness to approach and engage with others)
- And Surgency, which has to do with how outgoing, or activity and exploratory and engaged a person is (activity level; rhythmicity - how predictable and routine basic functions of the babies life are)
- Often goes hand-in-hand with a positive attitude toward new experiences and people
What are the 2 types of Negative Emotionality?
Fearful Distress & Irritable Distress
What are the characteristics of Fearful Distress?
- Wariness, distress, and withdrawal in new situations or in response to novel stimuli; high in behavioural inhibition
- Reluctant to engage with situations, like if they encounter new stimuli from chaotic new environment, to something as simple as beeping tones, they react quite strongly, often by crying and showing behavioural signs of distress, and withdrawing
What are the characteristics of Irritable Distress?
Fussiness, crying, and distress when one’s desires are frustrated
How might an infant with Irritable Distress react when seeing a tempting toy that is out of reach?
More dramatic reaction than expected/normal, crying, frustration, and yelling
Why do we separate these two types of Negative Emotionality into different dimensions?
Kids who are high on fearful distress but not irritable distress sometimes show different outcomes than kids who show the opposite pattern. Even these finer distinctions are relevant to helping us understand differences in temperament
Kids who are high on fearful distress when they’re around 2 or so years old, tend to develop stronger ___ Control when they’re a little bit older, around 5y/o
Effortful
The more Irritable Distress tends to be associated with ___ Effortful Control than
Lower
What is Self Regulation?
Your ability to control and regulate your reactions, and modulate them, so that when you experience something stressful or really exciting, you are able to manage it
What is Effortful Control?
The capacity to voluntarily suppress a dominant response in order to plan and execute a more adaptive response
