Mary K. Rothbart

Investigations of Temperament at Three to Seven Years: The Children's Behavior Questionnaire

This article reviews evidence on the reliability and validity of the Childrens Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ), and presents CBQ data on the structure of temperament in childhood. The CBQ is a caregiver report measure designed to provide a detailed assessment of temperament in children 3 to 7 years of age. Individual differences are assessed on 15 primary temperament characteristics: Positive Anticipation, Smiling/Laughter, High Intensity Pleasure, Activity Level, Impulsivity, Shyness, Discomfort, Fear, Anger/Frustration, Sadness, Soothability, Inhibitory Control, Attentional Focusing, Low Intensity Pleasure, and Perceptual Sensitivity. Factor analyses of CBQ scales reliably recover a three-factor solution indicating three broad dimensions of temperament: Extraversion/Surgency, Negative Affectivity, and Effortful Control. This three-factor solution also appears to be reliably recovered in ratings of children in other cultures (e.g., China and Japan). Evidence for convergent validity derives from confirmation of hypothesized relations between temperament and socialization-relevant traits. In addition, parental agreement on CBQ ratings is substantial. The CBQ scales demonstrate adequate internal consistency, and may be used in studies requiring a highly differentiated yet integrated measure of temperament for children in this age range.

Temperament and Personality: Origins and Outcomes

This article reviews how a temperament approach emphasizing biological and developmental processes can integrate constructs from subdisciplines of psychology to further the study of personality. Basic measurement strategies and findings in the investigation of temperament in infancy and childhood are reviewed. These include linkage of temperament dimensions with basic affective-motivational and attentional systems, including positive affect/approach, fear, frustration/anger, and effortful control. Contributions of biological models that may support these processes are then reviewed. Research indicating how a temperament approach can lead researchers of social and personality development to investigate important person-environment interactions is also discussed. Lastly, adult research suggesting links between temperament dispositions and the Big Five personality factors is described.

Developing mechanisms of self-regulation

Child development involves both reactive and self-regulatory mechanisms that children develop in conjunction with social norms. A half-century of research has uncovered aspects of the physical basis of attentional networks that produce regulation, and has given us some knowledge of how the social environment may alter them. In this paper, we discuss six forms of developmental plasticity related to aspects of attention. We then focus on effortful or executive aspects of attention, reviewing research on temperamental individual differences and important pathways to normal and pathological development. Pathologies of development may arise when regulatory and reactive systems fail to reach the balance that allows for both self-expression and socially acceptable behavior. It remains a challenge for our society during the next millennium to obtain the information necessary to design systems that allow a successful balance to be realized by the largest possible number of children.

Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation

Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body–mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training. The training method comes from traditional Chinese medicine and incorporates aspects of other meditation and mindfulness training. Compared with the control group, the experimental group of 40 undergraduate Chinese students given 5 days of 20-min integrative training showed greater improvement in conflict scores on the Attention Network Test, lower anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, a significant decrease in stress-related cortisol, and an increase in immunoreactivity. These results provide a convenient method for studying the influence of meditation training by using experimental and control methods similar to those used to test drugs or other interventions.

Studying infant temperament via the Revised Infant Behavior Questionnaire

Abstract This study describes a revision of a widely used parent-report measure of infant temperament, the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ; Rothbart, 1981 ). A rationally derived instrument was developed that included nine new scales and minor modifications of the seven scales of the IBQ. Parents of 360 infants, equally distributed over three age groups: 3–6 months; 6–9 months; and 9–12 months of age, participated. Conceptual and item analyses provided support for 14 of the 16 proposed scales, demonstrating satisfactory internal consistency. Inter-rater reliability was evaluated, with evidence of moderate agreement between primary and secondary caregivers. Monomethod discriminant validity was demonstrated through an examination of correlations among the Infant Behavior Questionnaire—Revised (IBQ-R) scale scores. Results of the factor analytic procedure were consistent with three broad dimensions of Surgency/Extraversion, Negative Affectivity, and Orienting/Regulation. Developmental and gender differences were also noted for a number of the IBQ-R scales. Specifically, older infants received higher scores on Approach, Vocal Reactivity, High Intensity Pleasure, Activity, Perceptual Sensitivity, Distress to Limitations, and Fear, whereas younger infants’ scores were higher for Low Intensity Pleasure, Cuddliness/Affiliation, and Duration of Orienting. Male infants obtained higher scores on Activity and High Intensity Pleasure, and female infants were rated higher on the Fear scale.

Reactive and effortful processes in the organization of temperament.

Self-organization can be approached in terms of developmental processes occurring within and between component systems of temperament. Within-system organization involves progressive shaping of cortical representations by subcortical motivational systems. As cortical representations develop, they feed back to provide motivational systems with enhanced detection and guidance capabilities. These reciprocal influences may amplify the underlying motivational functions and promote excessive impulsivity or anxiety. However, these processes also depend upon interactions arising between motivational and attentional systems. We discuss these between-system effects by considering the regulation of approach motivation by reactive attentional processes related to fear and by more voluntary processes related to effortful control. It is suggested than anxious and impulsive psychopathology may reflect limitations in these dual means of control, which can take the form of overregulation as well as underregulation.

The Development of Executive Attention: Contributions to the Emergence of Self-Regulation

Over the past decade, developmental studies have established connections between executive attention, as studied in neurocognitive models, and effortful control, a temperament system supporting the emergence of self-regulation. Functions associated with the executive attention network overlap with the more general domain of executive function in childhood, which also includes working memory, planning, switching, and inhibitory control (Welch, 2001). Cognitive tasks used with adults to study executive attention can be adapted to children and used with questionnaires to trace the role of attention and effortful control in the development of self-regulation. In this article we focus on the monitoring and control functions of attention and discuss its contributions to self-regulation from cognitive, temperamental, and biological perspectives.

Arousal, affect, and attention as components of temperament.

Contemporary models of human temperament have been based on the general constructs of arousal, emotion, and self-regulation. In order to more precisely investigate these constructs, they were theoretically decomposed into 19 subconstructs, and homogeneous scales were developed to assess them. The scales were constructed through an item-selection technique that maximized internal consistency and minimized conceptual overlap. Correlational and factor analyses suggested that arousal can be usefully assessed in terms of its central, autonomic, and motor components. The emotions of sadness, relief, and low-intensity pleasure were most closely related to the measures of central arousal. Emotions of fear, frustration, discomfort, and high-intensity pleasure were more closely related to measures of attentional control. We discuss these findings in terms of the functional relations between arousal, emotion, and attention.

Development of short and very short forms of the Children's Behavior Questionnaire.

Using data from 468 parents and taking into account internal consistency, breadth of item content, within-scale factor analysis, and patterns of missing data, we developed short (94 items, 15 scales) and very short (36 items, 3 broad scales) forms of the Childrens Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, & Hershey, 1994; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001), a well-established parent-report measure of temperament for children aged 3 to 8 years. We subsequently evaluated the forms with data from 1,189 participants. In mid/high-income and White samples, the CBQ short and very short forms demonstrated both satisfactory internal consistency and criterion validity, and exhibited longitudinal stability and cross-informant agreement comparable to that of the standard CBQ. Internal consistency was somewhat lower among African American and low-income samples for some scales. Very short form scales demonstrated acceptable internal consistency for all samples, and confirmatory factor analyses indicated marginal fit of the very short form items to a three-factor model.

Temperament, Development, and Personality

Understanding temperament is central to our understanding of development, and temperament constructs are linked to individual differences in both personality and underlying neural function. In this article, I review findings on the structure of temperament, its relation to the Big Five traits of personality, and its links to development and psychopathology. In addition, I discuss the relation of temperament to conscience, empathy, aggression, and the development of behavior problems, and describe the relation between effortful control and neural networks of executive attention. Finally, I present research on training executive attention.