ABSTRACT
When thinking about temperament, people generally have in mind characteristics of personality and descriptors such as shy, aggressive, sociable, active, emotional, distractible, dour, and cheerful. These characterizations recognize that people demonstrate persistent trends in the way they initiate and respond to situations and other people. There have been many studies of temperament. For example, one showed that each individual’s need for interaction itself emerges in a particular rhythm. This means that not everyone needs the same amount of interaction at the same time (Chapple, 1970). Another, a longitudinal study in the 1950s, identi˜ed nine unchanging temperamental factors: activity level, rhythmicity or regularity , approach or withdrawal, adaptability, sensory threshold, quality of mood, intensity of reactions, distractibility, and persistence or attention span (Chess & Thomas, 1996). In the 1980s, the reactivity (ranging from high to low) of infants was linked with a number of other physiological markers and to behavioral inhibition in 2-year-old children (Kagan, 2006).
