Outline

Chapter 9 Personality Development: Alternative Views

Defining Personality

Personality – the individuals enduring patterns of responses to and interactions with others and the environment.

Temperament

1. Three Views of Temperament

a. Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas proposed three temperament types – difficult, easy and slow-to-warm-up that reflected profiles on nine different dimensions.

2. An Emerging Consensus

b. Activity level – a tendency to move often and vigorously, rather than to remain passive.

c. Approach/positive emotionality – a tendency to move toward rather than away from new people, situations or objects

d. Inhibition and Anxiety – the flip side of approach is a tendency to respond with fear or to withdraw from new people.

e. Negative emotionality/irritability/ anger – a tendency to respond with anger, fussiness, loudness, or irritability.

f. Effortful control/task persistence – an ability to stay focused, to manage attention and effort.

3. Temperament Across Cultures

g. Since such differences are evident in newborns, they cannpt be the result of systematic shaping by the parents. But the parents bring their temperaments as well as their cultural training to interactions with their newborns.

The Big Five

Big Five personality traits are:

Extraversion – along with its opposite introversion, for instance, is quite similar to the temperamental dimensions of approach.

Agreeableness- draws on approach/ positive emotionality as well as effortful control.

Conscientiousness- has much in common with effortful control.

There is also good evidence that the Big Five are stable traits.

Longitudinal studies have provided support for the hypothesis that this particular dimension of temperament persist through childhood and gradually becomes subsumed by the extraversion dimension.

Genetic and Biological Explanations of Personality

The Biological Argument

Proposition 1: Each...