Behavioral Inhibition As A Temperamental Category

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Behavioral Inhibition As A Temperamental Category

• ----By Jerome Kagan

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The Definition of Temperament

• The sense meaning of temperament held by most
  scientists is a stable psychological profile,
  characteristic of only a proportion of the
  population, that has a biological foundation,
  that emerges during childhood, that is associated
  with particular affective states, and that is not
  a pathological category.

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The Measurement of Temperaments

• Debate The Number of Temperaments
• It is not possible at present to predict the
  number of temperaments. At least six reasons as
  following
• The first of all, the vast majority of studies
  rely on questionnaires that require adults to
  describe their own emotion and behaviors or those
  of their children. This form of evidence severely
  limits the number of temperaments, because of a
  persons verbal products have special features
  that are not characteristic of the phenomena that
  the sentences are intended to describe.

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• The second, humans are sensitive to the logical
  consistency of a series of answers.
• Third, most English words and sentences refer to
  discrete categories of events there are few
  words that describe blends. No language is rich
  enough to describe all the significant
  experiences that are within human competence.
• Fourth, every sentence implicitly assumes a
  comparison.
• Fifth, individuals differ in their understanding
  of the meanings of words. The opinions about
  childrens activity are always different between
  fathers and mothers, for instance.

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• Finally, investigators cannot ask participants
  about qualities that are not observable, and
  cannot use words that are not part of a
  consensual folk vocabulary.
• These limitations on verbal self-reports also
  challenge the utility of personality constructs.
  Further, social class position, gender, vocation,
  and the local context of action would be
  significant correlates of these personality
  categories.
• Thus, new temperaments will be discovered when
  test performances, biological measures, and
  direct behavioral observations are added to the
  information gained from questionnaires and
  interviews.

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Temperament as Continua or Categories

• The decision whether to regard temperaments as
  continuous dimensions or qualitative categories
  is both controversial and of theoretical
  significance.
• Most psychologists prefer continua over
  categories, because the use of inferential
  statistics became the mark of sophisticated
  social scientists during the late 1940s.
• The most important argument for categories is the
  fact that nonlinear functions are common in the
  life sciences.
• The study of biological from begins to take us in
  the direction of a science of qualities that is
  not an alternative to but complements and extends
  the science of quantities. (Goodwin,1994)

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What Is Affect?

• E.T. Rolls(1999) suggests that affect is a state
  created by a reward or the sign of reward.
• Suggested name for the emotion as following
• 1.Novel, discrepant, or unexpected events alert
  the individual (surprise to unexpected)
• 2.A novel, discrepant, or unexpected is not
  assimilated easily, and the individual does not
  have a coping response to make that failure (fear
  to the unfamiliar)

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• 3.Anticipation of a possible future threat to the
  individuals physiological or psychological state
  (anxiety to threat)
• 4.The individual has violated a community norm in
  the presence of other (shame)
• 5.The individual has violated a personal moral
  standard and believes that the act could have
  been suppressed (guilt)
• 6.A person or situation has frustrated the
  individuals attempt to gain a desired goal
  (anger to frustration)

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• 7.A person has implied that the individual
  possesses traits regarded as undesirable (anger
  to personal attack)
• 8.A source of pleasure or support has been
  withdrawn (sadness)
• 9.A source of pleasure or support has been
  withdrawn, and the agent feels that he or she has
  no response to cope with the loss (depression)
• 10.The individual attains a desired goal through
  effort (pride)

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• 11.The individual witnesses an event that matches
  a personal standard of competence, beauty, or
  perfection (admiration)
• 12.The individual experiences sensory pleasure
  (joy)
• 13.The individual experiences sexual arousal to a
  person, surrogate symbol, or thought (sexual
  desire)
• 14.The individual experiences sexual arousal
  combined with a feeling of admiration for the
  qualities of another (love)

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• 15.The individual experiences a loss of energy
  (fatigue)
• 16.The individual infers a state of distress in
  another (empathy)
• 17.The individual wishes an object or state
  believed to be possessed by another (envy)
• 18.The individual wishes the affection of a love
  object possessed by another (jealousy)

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History of the Concept of Temperament

• Before nineteenth century
• The Greek and Romans believed that a balance
  among the four humorsyellow and black bile,
  blood, phlegm.
• Galen, born in Asia Minor in the first century,
  derived from the four humors, and called them
  melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic.
• The Chinese viewed human nature as an energy
  called chI which was regulated by the
  complementary relationship between yang and yin.
  In addition, the Chinese thought there were five
  basic elements wood, fire, earth, metal, and
  water.

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• Nineteenth century to nowadays
• Franz Gall(1835) suggested that variations in
  human intention and emotion were based on
  differences in brain tissue that could be
  detected by measuring the skull.
• Ernst Krechmer(1925) invented the asthenic,
  pyknic, and athletic types.
• Sheldon(1940) divided the physiques into
  ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph.
• Freud substituted the concept of libido for
  Galens four humors and assumed that a balance
  among id, ego, and superego.

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• Buss and Plomin(1975) posit emotionality,
  activity, and sociability as three primary
  temperamental types.
• Thomas and Chess(1977) inferred nine
  temperamental dimensions. The nine categories
  were (1)general activity level, (2)regularity of
  basic function, (3)reactions to unfamiliarity,
  (4)ease of adapting to new situations,
  (5)responsiveness to stimulus events, (6)amount
  of energy associated with an activity,
  (7)dominant mood, (8)distractibility, and
  (9)attention span. Thomas and Chess used the
  correlation to create three abstract categories
  the easy child, the slow-to-warm-up child, and
  the difficult child.

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• Cloninger(1987) believes that avoidance of
  danger, seeking of novelty, and dependence on
  social rewards mark the three primary
  temperamental types.
• Gray(1994) implied that variation in three basic
  emotional systems accounts for the human
  temperaments. They were the behavioral inhibition
  system, system of flight-fight, and the
  behavioral approach system.

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The Concept of Inhibition

• Jerome Kagan and his colleagues have been
  studying two temperamental categories of children
  that they call inhibited and uninhibited to
  the unfamiliar.
• They regard shyness with strangers as only one
  feature of the broader temperamental category of
  inhibition to the unfamiliarity.
• Inhibited children react to many different types
  of unfamiliarity with avoidance, distress, or
  subdued emotion when they reach the age at which
  discrepancies elicit uncertainty, usually a few
  months before the first birthday.

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• The source of the unfamiliarity can be people,
  situations, objects, or events.
• The complementary category, called uninhibited,
  is defined by a sociable, affectively spontaneous
  reaction to unfamiliarity.
• The possibility of dissociation between the
  biological processes forms part of the foundation
  of a temperamental category and the behavioral
  phenotype.

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• An individual who possesses the genes for a
  particular feature may not display that feature.
  These evidences remind us that experience can
  change an early behavioral profile of extreme
  timidity, linked originally to the excitability
  of the amygdala and its projections, to a more
  normative profile without eliminating completely
  the excitability of the limbic structures that
  contributed to the infant behavior.

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Internal Tone

• The body tone each person lives with is
  completely hidden from observers and, at the
  moment, so far beyond measurement that it does
  not enter into most theorizing.
• The biology that is a vital component of each
  temperament probably affects this internal tone
  and, as a consequence, modulates moods and acute
  emotions. It is here that temperaments darkest
  shadow may fall.

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Temperament as Constraint

• The term determine implies a particular
  consequence constraint implies a restriction on
  a set of outcomes.
• It is probably useful to regard each
  temperamental bias as imposing a constraint on
  the probability of developing a particular family
  of profiles rather than to assume that a
  temperamental bias determines the development of
  a particular trait.