Abstract
The concept of temperament is useful for distinguishing between one child and another and between the child and the social environment. Temperament traits have been regarded as the core of personality and have been shown by research to have important associations with developmental psychopathology. For decades, developmental psychopathology research using temperament has been growing vigorously. We found 1,441 peer-reviewed articles on temperament published between 2009 and June of 2012. Seventy percent of these considered temperament in relation to concepts representing the broader domain of developmental psychopathology, such as behavior problems, externalizing, internalizing, and psychiatric diagnoses. Consistent with the vigor of this area of research, numerous major reviews, edited volumes, and monographs on temperament’s relations with developmental psychopathology have appeared in recent years, including Seifer (2000) in the previous edition of this handbook; Caspi and Shiner (2006), Degnan, Almas, and Fox (2010), De Pauw and Mervielde (2010), Kiff, Lengua, and Zalewski (2011), Rothbart (2011), Zentner and Shiner (2012), and Klein, Dyson, Kujawa, and Kotov (2012), just to cite a few of the more recent reviews. We have also contributed reviews (e.g., Bates & Pettit, 2007; Bates, Schermerhorn, & Goodnight, 2010; Bates, Schermerhorn, & Petersen, 2012; Rothbart & Bates, 2006; Wachs & Bates, 2010). This chapter explains our conceptual definition of temperament and how it contributes to the development of psychopathology. This chapter also considers a few measurement issues and some key findings about temperament’s role in developmental psychopathology.
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- 1.
The complete list of search terms entered into the search tool, PsycInfo: psychopathology, adaptation, adjustment, competence, externalizing, internalizing, antisocial, depression, anxiety, aggression, disorder, and of course, temperament. This may have missed studies of variables we would consider temperament that were given other names.
- 2.
Because developmental exploration of a third dimension of psychopathology in relation to temperament is not highly developed, it is not a focus of this chapter. For similar reasons, the chapter also does not focus on temperament origins of positive adjustment dimensions that might be independent of the pathology dimensions.
- 3.
Nevertheless, we keep in mind that the phenotypes we call temperament, whether caregiver ratings, observations of behavior, or observations of psychophysiological process, necessarily reflect a history of transactions with the social environment as well as inborn tendencies. At the same time, the phenotypes we call environment also reflect a history of transactions with the child as well as inborn tendencies (of the parents and children).
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Bates, J.E., Schermerhorn, A.C., Petersen, I.T. (2014). Temperament Concepts in Developmental Psychopathology. In: Lewis, M., Rudolph, K. (eds) Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9608-3_16
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