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Temperament Concepts in Developmental Psychopathology
Book chapter

Temperament Concepts in Developmental Psychopathology

John E Bates, Alice C Schermerhorn and Isaac T Petersen
Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology, pp.311-329
Springer US
03/03/2014
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-9608-3_16

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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.
Negative Emotionality Temperament Dimension Effortful Control Behavioral Adjustment Positive Emotionality

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