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Psychology vocabulary · Developmental Psychology

Temperament

Meaning in psychology, with examples

/ˈtemprəmənt/nounCommon term

In psychology, temperament means: A child's inborn, biologically based style of reacting to the world, such as activity level, mood and how easily they adapt, which forms a basis for later personality.

In Turkish: mizaç

How it is used

Thomas and Chess described easy, difficult and slow-to-warm-up temperaments; later researchers such as Jerome Kagan studied behavioural inhibition. Temperament is usually discussed for infants and children, personality for adults.

Example sentences

  1. Infants with a shy, inhibited temperament were more likely to show social anxiety later in childhood.

  2. Parents often notice their child's temperament in the first months of life.

Common collocations

  • difficult temperament
  • easy temperament
  • temperament and personality
  • inhibited temperament
  • personalityThe fairly stable pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person different from others and consistent across situations and over time.
  • traitA relatively stable tendency to think, feel or behave in a certain way across many situations, such as being outgoing, anxious or organised.
  • nature versus nurtureThe long-running debate about how much human traits and behaviour are shaped by genes and biology (nature) and how much by experience and environment (nurture).
  • attachmentThe deep emotional bond between a child and a caregiver, and the pattern of relating to others that grows from it and can continue into adulthood.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Developmental Psychology

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