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Temperament and Emotion

Early occurring individual differences play a large role in shaping developmental trajectories over the course of childhood and adolescence. Traditionally, developmental psychology has been heavily oriented toward nomothetic laws of human development, which argue for understanding typical patterns of fairly universal human behavior that hold true across individuals and contexts (Pérez-Edgar & Hastings, 2018). More recently, there has been a greater emphasis on an idiographic focus, which aims to study variations within the population, or behaviors that are unique to individual children. To illustrate this approach, the current review focuses specifically on the role of temperament in emotional development. Temperament can be conceptualized as biologically rooted and relatively stable individual differences in emotion expression, experience, and regulation. Temperament researchers are particularly interested in how these components of emotion develop over time in relation to the emergence of increasingly complex socioemotional behaviors. Examining the link between early temperament and later patterns of behavior will help us better understand both normative and nonnormative trajectories. Temperament researchers differ when characterizing the strength of the temperament-to-emotion link across development. However, nearly all would argue that emotion-related behaviors are at least partially tethered to temperament profiles. This entry first discusses temperament theories as well as the working definitions of temperament that have emerged from them. Next, it demonstrates the relations between temperament and emotion in the study of child development. Finally, it discusses contemporary research focusing on intrinsic (i.e., biological and cognitive) and extrinsic (i.e., contextual) processes that play a role in the links between temperament and socioemotional behaviors and outcomes.