Temperament and Personality Flashcards
Stranger Wariness
10m old
Inhibition - types
Inhibition is central to characterization of an individuals temperament
Inhibited child - timid and shy
Uninhibited child - bold and outgoing
Infant Reactivity
Classify infants based on how active and reactive they are when faced with unfamiliar people objects and situations - 4m
High reactive infant - increased motor activity and distress when faced with a new situation
Low reactive children - less fearful and irritable when faced with new experiences
Rothbart - 3 dimensions of temperament -Extraversion
High levels of positive emotion
Positive anticipation of new events
Sensation seeking
High on this dimension: happy, active, talkative and social
Babies: smile and laugh a lot
Children: high self-esteem
Rothbart - 3 dimensions of temperament - negative affect
Anger, irritability, fear and sadness
High on this dimension: unhappy, afraid of new situations
Not easily calmed
2-3m - easily frustrated
Infants: fearful and inhibited in new situations
Children: shy and less aggressive
Rothbart - 3 dimensions of temperament -Effortful control
Developing executive function abilities
High on this dimension: focus on task without being easily distracted, plan ahead and inhibit a dominant response and instead employ a non-dominant response - waiting for a treat instead of taking it
Childhood: high on this are better socialized, more sympathetic and less aggressive - consider others points of view
Related to emotional regulation
New York Study - temperament
141 - as they developed from infancy to adulthood
Attempt to identify factors that could predict an individual’s future psychological adjustment- measuring temperament via parent interview and home observation at 2m
Interested in the stability of temperament
Early characteristics measured in first year of life were moderately good predictors of the extent to which children would have behavioral problems in school
Temperamental factors were weaker predictors than other home factors such as parental consistency and support
Kagan - moderate levels of stability over time
High reactive infants: 2yr shy socially fearful and timid
Low reactive infants : 2yrs bolder and less inhibited, fearless in new situations
signs of temperament evident shortly after birth are predictive
Effortful control study
9m tested for effortful control using a task where they had to avoid touching a forbidden toy
At 22 & then 33m - tested for effortful control using tasks that required permission for m&m treat
Researchers found evidence of moderate stability: performance at 9 months of age predicted performance at 22 and 33 months
Personality
Personality: Emotional and behavioral traits that develop during childhood that differ from one individual to another.
may differ from individual to individual in a way that maximizes one’s specific opportunities and develops as an individual is exposed to information that informs her about her specific circumstances.
EX. Some environments may favor risk taking while others favor avoidance
Facultative Adaptation
Facultative Adaptation
Facultative Adaptation: An adaptation that is designed to respond to specific cues in the environment, thus preparing organisms for the varying conditions that were possible in the EEA
species-universal mechanisms that are developmentally responsive to information in the environment.
These adaptations were selected because developmental plasticity increased fitness in the EEA.
Examples: calluses on feet or hands as a result of friction and the suntan in response to UV light - take place in response to conditions and by design
Facultative adaptation - psychological examples
Develop based on the context - nature and nurture working together - favored
Psychological examples: language learning - cant be anticipated, developmental differences from parenting styles, attachment styles
Any type of learning relies on facultative adaptation
Social Facultative Adaptations
Social Facultative Adaptation: An adaptation designed to respond to specific cues in the social environment, allowing one to develop the most advantageous social strategy
Adapt to: status compared to peers, learn to love mother, birth order
Result in personality differences - more personality differences in social species
personality differences serve the function of reducing competition, as individuals specialize in a particular social niche
Social Facultative: Adolescent Status and the Development of Dominance
Dominant or submissive personality traits as a result of status and attractiveness
Large and strong - able to command respect, a dominant personality can maximize this opportunity.
A smaller, weaker person who similarly adopted the behaviors of a dominant personality type might be challenged, and ultimately pay more for his behaviors than he benefits
—Longitudinal study - boys who are bigger at age three are more aggressive at age 11, even after taking into account their size at 11
Boys who are taller at age 14 are more dominant in adulthood, even when adult height is taken into account
Boys puberty onset/height and dominance - social facultative
Study - 2 groups of boys - started puberty and grew early, and those who started puberty and grew at a later age—from early adolescence to adulthood
Boys who had been taller and stronger than peers in adolescence had more dominant and self-assured personalities in adulthood, even when later developing boys had caught up to them in stature
Height during adolescence is a better predictor of adult salary than is adult height
Taller, more mature boys not only have higher status in adolescence but develop lasting personality traits associated with status.
Canadians who had been younger than classmates during their school years were more likely than the general population to commit suicide, and this suicide risk was attributed to lower confidence and lower self-esteem
Accepting different rank than highest - dominance and social facultative
Accepting a rank other than the highest rank does not mean one has forfeited all opportunity, rather it is itself a strategy.
More submissive personality traits are different strategies that people can use to gain favors from others and to solve other social adaptive problems
Benefits to late maturation including more robust health and a longer life-span.
Girls and dominance - social facultative
Girls are learning about their relative attractiveness. Girls who are rated as the most attractive by peers during adolescence, like boys who are tall during adolescence, are likely to develop more assertive, self-assured personalities
Social Facultative - Birth Order: first-born inheritance
Conservative or adventurous - result from birth order
In humans, as in several bird species, the first-born child (or in some cases the first-born son) will inherit many or all of the parents’ resources.
Family home is a resource that is practically indivisible: If you split the family farm in two, its value decreases by more than half. If your children then take their halves and split them up for your grandchildren - too small to sustain a family unit.
Better strategy to keep the homestead as an indivisible unit, give it to your first-born, and let him pass it undivided to his first-born.
Creates a situation in which there are different optimal strategies for first-born children and later-born children.
Social Facultative - Birth Order: life strategies
The oldest child, who is likely to inherit the parents’ home and status, identifies most strongly with the parents and with authority figures generally - grows up being conservative, a supporter of tradition and the status quo.
A surprising number of presidents and heads-of-state are first-born children.
The younger child has a different optimal strategy- has to seek his or her fortune elsewhere - more of a risk-taker and, out of necessity, thinks outside of the box. Sulloway’s book Born to Rebel is a nod toward that developmental propensity.
Charles Darwin is one example. Harriet Tubman, was also a later-born child.
Life History Theory
life history theory which predicts that an indvidual’s sexual strategy will respond to the availability of a committed partner
Major Life events and Life History strategies
account for and predict the timing of major life events across development, especially dealing with the trade-off in allocating resources to growth and reproduction.
major life events include puberty, mating, pregnancy and childbirth, and menopause
Finite supply of resources, time, and energy across the competing goals of physical growth, physical and energetic maintenance, and reproduction
subdivided into mating efforts and parenting efforts.
decide when to switch their life strategies from growth to reproduction
Once one has begun the reproductive period in the life cycle, one must make strategic decisions between allocating resources to existing offspring (parenting) and seeking new mating opportunities.
Facultative adaptations in humans are designed to allow people to calibrate their reproductive strategy during development based on whether or not they live in a society where men invest in their offspring
Parental Investment Society
Choose whether to mate and reproduce earlier in life or defer reproduction until life circumstances are propitious
decide whether to commit to monogamy and invest all of his resources in a mate and that mate’s children or to try to maximize the number of mates and children he has
Choices are not necessarily conscious, and the strategy employed involves physical and physiological changes as well as behavioral changes.
Paternal investment is not obligatory, which means it is not always necessary for the child’s survival
If paternal investment has little or no benefit to offspring’s survival and quality of life, paternal abandonment (in pursuit of other mating opportunities) will be favored as a strategy
expected only in situations where a father can deliver enough resources to his mate and children to make a difference
Women - life strategy based on society type
WOMEN - wait to start reproducing until you have secured the commitment of a man who promises to be a good provider and committed father, or you could get started on reproduction as soon as possible, taking advantage of more of your available reproductive years and perhaps securing short-term investments from a number of men
a society in which paternal investment is the norm, in which men tend to marry and remain with their families, a woman’s best reproductive strategy is to commit to an investing mate.
HIGH INVESTMENT society commonly receive biparental care, so a woman would need to secure paternal care for her child in order for that child to be competitive among his or her peers.
- Vulnerable to being abandoned by a mate and left with the sole responsibility of raising the children, so she must be careful about choosing a man.
- She needs to have a mate who believes in her sexual fidelity and thus believes that her children are his children.
- Doing anything that might create doubt in her mate’s mind about her fidelity is a risk to the relationship in this kind of society.
LOW INVESTMENT - society where men do not tend to invest in their offspring or make long-term commitments to their sexual partners, then a woman need not wait for a committed partner in order to begin reproducing
If she were to wait, she might fail to take advantage of reproductive opportunities. In this situation, a woman is better off focusing on the resources that can be harvested from a short-term sexual liaison
—to garner more resources by having more sexual partners compared to a woman who tries to secure the investment of a monogamous partner - doing so reduces her attractiveness as a marriage partner, so correctly assessing which society she is in is important to maximizing her reproductive success
MAN - life strategy based on society type
family man strategy is fruitful if his wife’s children are also his children.
HIGH Investment - women are likely to be very discriminating, saving themselves for men who really are good husbands and fathers
may have to spend considerable time and effort in courtship and may find that his best strategy is to actually commit to and raise the children of his mate
DANGER - cuckolded. If he contributes his reproductive efforts to his wife and her children, but his wife’s children are not his children, he is (from an evolutionary point of view) squandering his resources to promote someone else’s genetic interests.
LOW - relative promiscuity, a man may have greater reproductive success by seeking other mating opportunities instead of staying with his family. In such a society, most of the children (his child’s competitors) have only maternal care as they mature, so withholding paternal care from his own children will not be a severe handicap for them relative to their peers
Learning social environment
Depending on their social contexts, developing children and adolescents select one strategy or another and develop behaviors, emotions, and physiologies that promote that strategy
very early age, children are receptive to information about their social environment that tells them how stable the families, marriages, and social relationships around them are - critical period for learning type of society they are in
Whether a child’s father is absent or present during early to mid-childhood informs that child of whether she is likely to be in a high paternal-investment or low paternal-investment society and thus influences her own sexual strategy
Father Absent MEN
Likely low investing society
More manipulative
More competitive
Father present - MEN
likely high investing
more stable romantic relationships
Father absent WOMEN
Likely low investing society
Sexually active earlier
more sexual partners
more dominant
better liars
Father Present - WOMEN
LIkely high investing
later puberty
more securely attached
smile more frequently
lower androgen levels
Cashdan - Experiment - Women in uni dorm
Young women housed in a university dormitory and discovered that each woman could be placed in one of two categories and that a whole suite of personality and physiological traits measured the differences between these categories
One group of women had more sexual partners, were more dominant, had higher self-esteem, had higher androgen levels, and smiled infrequently.
The other group of women had fewer sexual partners, displayed traits thought of as more feminine, were more popular, and had lower androgen levels.
Cashdan - Experiment - Women in uni dorm
Relationship btw explicit expectations of the likelihood of securing paternal care and their own reproductive strategy
women and men who expected that paternal investment was scarce showed a more promiscuous sexual strategy
Men who believe that children can or cannot be raised without a father
Participants indicated where, along the continuum, their own beliefs lay, calculate whether this participant was likely to be an investing male.
questionnaire that was designed to measure which sexual strategy the person was actually employing
Women’s expectations about the likelihood of finding an investing male predicted their sexual strategy. If they believed they were likely to secure an investing male, they showed that they had eyes only for their dates, downplayed sexuality, and postponed sexual activity within a relationship.
Unlikely that they could secure the commitment of an investing male were more likely to wear sexy clothes, had more sexual partners, and used more overt sexual strategies to attract the attention of their dates
Males who thought that high paternal investment was expected tried to attract mates by investing and courting.
Men who thought that low paternal investment was acceptable were more overtly sexual in their mating strategies.
In either case, people were maximizing their chances for success in the society they believed themselves to inhabit.
Pubertal Timing - social facultative
response to ecological conditions
puberty as the beginning of the end of growth and the beginning of the reproductive years.
allocate resources to growth for an extended period of time or curtail the growth period in favor of earlier sexual maturation
Pubertal timing responds to ecological conditions
the prediction that one proximate factor that would mediate these differences was a difference in pubertal timing: Girls who grow up in a home with a father experience puberty later than girls who grow up in a home with no father
Evolved psychological mechanisms in the child’s first five to seven years of life designed to assess the environment with respect to the father’s presence
Stress might lead to the development of psychological traits that are beneficial in an unpredictable environment.
under chronic stress or unpredictable conditions suggests that in such circumstances, children will be damaged by the adversity, suffering impairments in learning and long-lasting damage to their personal and professional goals
A more functional adaptive view suggests that under such circumstances children may develop skills and abilities that are adapted for coping in such an environment
Any decision to delay reproduction and invest instead in growth carries an inherent risk: The individual might die and leave no offspring.
In an unpredictable environment, investments that are expected to have far-off paydays may not be worth it.
Strategy in unpredictable environments
Unpredictable environments in which sources of mortality are uncontrollable provide a selection pressure in favor of fast Life History strategies: reproduce early in life
Strategy in stable environments
Stable predictable environments in which sources of mortality are controllable provide a selection pressure in favor of slower Life History strategies: don’t reproduce until you’ve finished investing in your own growth and resources are secure.
Chicago - increase in mortality rates = increase in probability of first child before 30
Gloucestershire - baby in teens - shorter lifespan
Cues to instability - earlier puberty
Australia - unfavourable socioeconomic conditions - increase in early puberty - same result in US
children who grow up in stressful environments more easily disengage their attention and re-orient to new information in the environment
Low family income is strongly associated with reduced executive function
Functional framing of this tendency highlights the superior attention shifting as the ability of these children to take advantage of opportunities that might be fleeting in an unpredictable environment, as well as to be vigilant against unanticipated threats
Ability to focus attention may aid children in secure, predictable environments in attaining academic and professional goals, but stress-adapted children may benefit from a cognitive style that allows them to acquire information from diverse sources, and innovate novel solutions
. Self-control leads to academic and social benefits for children in stable and predictable environments, but in unpredictable environments it is adaptive to reap rewards immediately when they become available
