Psychology - Personality Temperament

Temperament

The inbuilt natural mood and personality. All traits that you were born with are inherited by your parents.

Thomas, Chess and Birch (1977)

AIM: To discover whether ways of responding to the environment remain stable throughout life.

METHOD: 

- They studied 133 children from infancy to early adulthood

- The childerns behaviour was observed and their parents were interviewed

- The parents were asked about the childs routine and its reactions to change

RESULTS: They found that children fell into three catorgories: easy, difficult or slow to warm up.

CONCLUSION: These ways of responding to the environment stayed with the children as they developed therefore they concluded that themperament is innate.

EVALUATION: 

Strangth: Shows us how people behave in real life therefore having high ecological validity as the children were observed in a real life setting.

Weakness: Parents may have been biased in the answers they gave in the interviews therefore affecting the reliability of the results.

Buss and Plomin (1984)

AIM: To test the idea that temperament is innate.

METHOD:

- They studied 228 pairs of identical twins (MZ) and 172 pairs of non-identical twins (DZ)

- Rating scales were given to…