Developing a model for adult temperament

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Abstract

Hierarchical relations among theoretically generated lower order scales of adult temperament were explored in two studies. In Study One, 258 undergraduates completed the Adult Temperament Questionnaire (ATQ). A five-factor model emerged from exploratory factor analysis, with factors labeled Orienting Sensitivity, Effortful Control, Extraversion, Affiliativeness, and Negative Affect. This model showed considerable convergence with the Big Five. Study Two, with a community sample of 700 participants, yielded a six-factor model, distinguishing aggressive negative affect from non-aggressive negative affect. Relations of the six temperament factors to Cloninger’s TCI, the Five Factor Model, and the Multi-Language Seven were investigated, providing support for the discriminating power of the six-factor temperament model in understanding individual differences in adult temperament and personality.

Introduction

There is general agreement that temperamental processes are rooted in biological systems, and that emotion is basic to temperament (see Goldsmith et al., 1987). Work by Thomas and Chess (1977) and Rothbart and Derryberry (1981) has added individual differences in attentional capacities to the more commonly assessed emotional reactivity. Ongoing work in animal neurophysiology, human brain imaging, and molecular genetics has led to psychobiological models of temperament processes that are becoming increasingly comprehensive (Cloninger, 1998, Gray, 1990, Panksepp, 1998). To facilitate the development of temperament models and to investigate relations between temperament and personality, it is essential that psychometrically sound measures of temperament constructs be developed. In this paper, we explore the hierarchical relations among lower level constructs of temperament in an extension of Derryberry and Rothbart’s (1988) original adult temperament scales. The resulting instrument, called the Adult Temperament Questionnaire (ATQ), is further related to Cloninger’s Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and to the Five Factor and Multi-Language Seven models of personality traits.

Temperament is seen as a subdomain of personality, but personality extends beyond temperament to include specific cognitions, beliefs and values. The contemporary view is that temperament includes dispositional attentional processes (e.g., effortful attention, Rothbart & Bates, 2006), but not specific cognitions. Specific cognitions may be influenced by temperament, as when an individual who is temperamentally fearful is biased toward developing pessimistic attitudes about the future, but the temperament and non-temperament personality domains remain separable.

A highly differentiated measure of temperament for adults based on Rothbart and colleagues’ conceptualization of temperament is described in these studies. At the most general level motivational–emotional and attentional constructs are explored by defining more specific temperament constructs at lower levels (e.g., fear within the domain of negative affect). The structure of the emerging temperament model is then determined, with the structure related to models of personality traits.

In recent years, considerable research on personality has supported a five-factor personality model. Common labels for the five factors are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism versus emotional stability, and Intellect/Imagination (or Openness in the Five Factor Model, McCrae, 1993/1994). The term Big Five is generally reserved for measures derived from analysis of the trait-descriptive lexicon, whereas McCrae and Costa’s approach is based on more extensive questionnaire items and referred to as the Five Factor Model (FFM). The Big Five and FFM structures are substantially correlated (see McCrae & John, 1992), and we generally refer to the model as the Big Five/FFM.

Previous theory and research have linked measures of temperament to the Big Five/FFM. McCrae, Costa, Ostendorf, Angleitner, and Hrebickova (2000), for example, argued for subsuming the Big Five/FFM models under temperament. They note that evidence from behavioral genetics, animal personality, and the considerable stability of the Big Five/FFM across development and cultures supports the proposition that the five factor structure of personality is based on more fundamental temperamental processes. They note that temperament researchers tend to emphasize basic processes such as attention and affect, whereas Big Five and Five Factor Model researchers are more likely to go beyond basic processes to emphasize prognostic outcomes, e.g., using conscientiousness to predict job performance. Personality researchers also often stress the effects individual differences have on others, especially in the agreeableness construct (Hogan & Hogan, 1995), although the difficultness construct in temperament is also concerned with these effects (Thomas & Chess, 1977).

Using adult subjects, Angleitner and Ostendorf (1994) have related the Big Five/FFM to four measures of temperament, the Strelau Temperament Inventory (Strelau, Angleitner, Bantelmann, & Ruch, 1990), the EASI-III Temperament Survey (Buss & Plomin, 1975), the Sensation-Seeking Scale (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978), and the Dimensions of Temperament Survey (Windle & Lerner, 1986). Five- and six-factor solutions similar to the Big Five/FFM were extracted, and temperament scores loaded with Big Five/FFM factors. The six-factor solution included an additional rhythmicity factor.

Angleitner and Ostendorf also carried out a factor analysis of the temperament measures alone. Factor scores from this solution were then correlated with factor scores from the six-factor solution that included the Big Five/FFM measures. Correlations were high, but consistent with convergence of only four factors in the temperament analyses to the personality model. Angleitner and Ostendorf’s (1994) research aggregated multiple measures of temperament, rather than relating specific temperament constructs to adult models. One of the goals of the current research is to investigate relations between specifically defined temperament constructs and the Big Five/FFM.

Like Derryberry and Rothbart (1988) in the original adult Physiological Reactions Questionnaire or PRQ, scales and their operational definitions were generated from temperament constructs. The broad domains to be investigated were selected from previous work. Evidence from research on temperament (Putnam et al., 2001, Strelau and Zawadzki, 1997), neuroscience (Carver and White, 1994, Davidson, 1993, Depue and Collins, 1999, Derryberry and Tucker, 1992, Gray, 1990), and affective individual differences (Watson and Clark, 1992, Watson and Walker, 1996, Watson et al., 1999), for example, suggests the existence of at least two high level temperamental motivational–emotional domains. One of these is associated with potentially aversive stimuli and negative affect, the other with potentially appetitive stimuli and positive affect. Our labels for these domains are negative affect and extraversion/surgency, respectively.

We also wished to explore the differentiation of aggressive and non-aggressive negative affect by adding scales with aggression-related content. Derryberry and Rothbart (1997) differentiated fear and frustration, and Zuckerman, 1997, Zuckerman et al., 1993 identified superfactors discriminating fear-anxiety and anger-aggression constructs in research with adults. Some models of personality, however, do not make this distinction (e.g., Harkness et al., 1995, Tellegen, 1985, Watson et al., 1999). Costa and McCrae’s (1994) scales of neuroticism (e.g., anxiety, depression, and anger-hostility) are consistent with Tellegen’s (1985) model. Under their Five Factor Model, however, aggression is related to both Neuroticism and to the negative pole of Agreeableness (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1994). Aggression items are also included at the negative pole of Cloninger’s cooperation scale (see Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994).

The original PRQ study had also included only one scale with surgency/extraversion-related content (high intensity pleasure). The PRQ high intensity pleasure scale was to a large extent a sensation-seeking construct, including items related to likely enjoyment of skydiving or racecar driving. For the ATQ version, we replaced most of these items for this scale in an effort to remove the influence of fear on responses. One might enjoy the idea of skydiving, for example, while also being fearful of jumping from an airplane, so this item was removed. A new sociability scale was defined as enjoyment in interacting with and being in the presence of others, as distinguished from fear and shyness in interactions with others (see Buss, 1991, for a discussion distinguishing sociability from shyness). In addition to high intensity pleasure and sociability, a scale assessing positive affect (its intensity, duration, frequency, rate of onset, and rising intensity of pleasure) was also included.

Rothbart and Derryberry (1981) and Rothbart, Derryberry, and Posner (1994) have proposed attentional processes as fundamental components of temperament. Effortful control, a broad temperament construct based on the executive attention system (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005), includes attentional and inhibitory control (ability to inhibit inappropriate behavior). Activation control (capacity to perform an action when there is a strong tendency to avoid it) was also added to the ATQ. A second broad attentional construct is orienting sensitivity. It includes constructs of perceptual sensitivity (awareness of slight, low intensity stimulation arising from the external or internal environment), associative sensitivity (frequency and remoteness of automatic cognitive activity), and affective perceptual sensitivity (awareness of affect associated with low intensity stimuli). To investigate the separability of reactive and effortful attentional processes, the breadth of reactive sensitivity was emphasized in the ATQ scales.

Scales were also added within the domain of affiliativeness. Rothbart and others (Derryberry and Rothbart, 1997, Ellis and Rothbart, 2007, Gartstein and Rothbart, 2003, Oldehinkel et al., 2004, Rothbart, 1994, Rothbart et al., 2000, Rothbart & Bates, 1998) have proposed affiliativeness as a dimension of temperament. Affiliativeness involves concern for others, whereas sociability refers to a preference for conversing, interacting, and approaching others.

Affiliative scales assessing emotional empathy (affective responses congruent with the feelings of others), empathic guilt (distress in response to negatively affecting other people), and social closeness (feelings of warmth, closeness, interest and involvement with others) were assessed. The goal was for each scale to be conceptually differentiated from the others while also being part of a general positive concern for others. The ATQ was originally developed using operational definitions for these temperament constructs, including only items fitting those definitions. A pilot study for scale development involved 207 undergraduate subjects, and 16 internally reliable scales were developed (Evans, 2004). Data from an additional 114 undergraduates evaluated the internal consistency and correlations among affiliativeness and aggression-related scales, yielding 2 additional scales.

Section snippets

Study One

Goals of the research were thus to explore the hierarchical relations among lower level theoretically generated constructs of temperament, and to relate temperament constructs to the lexical Big Five model of personality. Factor analysis was used to investigate hierarchical relations among temperament variables. Factor scores derived from this model were then related to scores from Saucier’s (1994) Mini-Marker measure of the Big Five.

In Study One, scales within six general domains were

Study Two

Study Two further explored a hierarchical model within a larger and more diverse sample. Analyses for Study One had showed EFA support for a five-factor model, with aggressive and non-aggressive negative affect sub-constructs collapsing into a single negative affect factor. Although a conceptually clear five-factor model emerged, some of the scales loaded on more than one factor. These multiple loading scales were deleted from the instrument for Study Two, so that each scale would more

General discussion

Our primary motivation for these studies was to develop a hierarchical model of temperament based on development of operationally defined temperament constructs within broad temperament domains. In Study Two, this goal was substantially achieved, with internally consistent scales related to each other within the six original broad domains. In Study One, a five-factor rather than the expected six-construct model emerged. The five-factor model reflected constructs from the initial six domains,

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    This research was supported by the Emotion Research Training Grant 5 T32 MH18934 funded by NIMH and awarded to David Evans as a trainee, and by NIMH Grants MH43361 and MH40662 awarded to Mary Rothbart. We thank Doug Derryberry, Carmen Gonzalez, Catharina Hartman, Bertram Malle, Tommie Mobbs, Michael Posner, Myron Rothbart, Gerard Saucier, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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