TEMPERAMENT

• Biologically based individual differences in emotion, motor

reactivity and self-regulation – consistent across situations
and over time
• Easy
• Cheerful, relaxed and predictable; adjust easily to new
situations and quick to establish routines; easy to calm

• Difficult
• Irritable, intense and unpredictable; slow to adjust to new
situations reacting negatively and intensely to stimuli and events

• Slow-to-warm-up
• Resist or withdraw from new people and situations; somewhat
difficult at first but become easier over time
 ATTACHMENT AND
TEMPERAMENT
• Consider the ‘goodness of fit’ which is the degree to which an
individual’s temperament is compatible with the expectations
and demands of social context
• Parents can regulate a child’s temperament by influencing the
environment
• What would be good parenting for a difficult baby/child?
• What would be good parenting for a slow-to-warm-up
baby/child?

• Often, a baby’s temperament influences how a parent reacts

to their child
• Group the questions into three equal
groups (10)
• Based on your readings what label do you
give them in terms of parenting style?
• How do you know? What evidence is
there that they correspond to that
style?
• Remember to assess yourself
 PARENTING STYLES

Warm Cold
Lots of Authoritative Authoritarian
Punitive
Guidance (High Self-Esteem (Aggression)
and Achievment)
Little Permissive Neglectful
Guidance (Low Self-Control) (Low Self-
Esteem)
 RESPONSIVE PARENTING
• Responsive parents: are sensitive to child’s needs and
meet them quickly
• Unresponsive parents: attend to baby when they feel
like it, and ignore the baby at other times
 ATTACHMENT AND SEVERE
DEPRIVATION
• There was a push for increased population from the
authoritarian government in Romania during the 1970s and
80s
• Contraception was outlawed, abortion forbidden and families
were taxed if they had fewer than five children
• Many families could not afford the extra children and they were
abandoned to state-run orphanages often with a 15:1 child to
caregiver ratio
• These children had lower IQ scores, extremely high levels of
anxiety
• Most children are resilient
• They withstand trauma and become healthy adults

• Others, especially those without a sharp break with an

abusive past, continue to significantly struggle
• Harlow monkeys bore lifelong scars – could not positively and
meaningfully socialize with other monkeys their age
• 30% of people who have been abused later abuse their children
• Abused children are hypersensitive to angry faces