This study examines whether young children can differentiate between the situational antecedents of happiness and pride and the effect of the type of situation on the attribution of pride. One hundred and fifty 7-, 9- and 11-year-olds were asked to rate the extent to which two types of situations would elicit a protagonist's feelings of happiness…

Recent studies have suggested the existence of three personality types: resilients, overcontrollers, and undercontrollers. In this article, we searched for subtypes within each of the three main personality types. Using cluster analysis on the Big Five personality self-descriptions of 3,284 Dutch adolescent boys and girls, we distinguished…

Self-regulation is critical to social and personality development in all cultures. Self-regulation may have developmental origins in temperament, yet it also interacts with socialization processes. This research specifically probes children's self-regulation during resistance to temptation. Socialization of self-regulation may be influenced by the…

While there is a general consensus that temperament forms the enduring, biologically based foundation of personality and that this biological basis should imply some continuity within the individual across time, there is a limited literature exploring linkages between these areas. The purpose of this article was to provide an initial assessment of…

Cohort-sequential latent growth modeling was used to analyze longitudinal data for children's externalizing behavior from four overlapping age cohorts (4, 5, 6, and 7 years at first assessment) measured at three annual time points. The data included mother and father ratings on the Child Behavior Checklist and the Five-Factor Personality Inventory…

In this commentary I make three points. First, the four articles presented in this special issue are critical examples of the viability and importance of the idea of childhood personality. Second, I identify several concerns, including the narrow scope of the study of childhood personality, the lack of focus on environmental factors that might…

The interactions of 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old children and their mothers reading two initially unfamiliar books were observed three times over a 2-week period. Coding characterized both the content and the role of their utterances as they discussed the stories. Utterance content depended on child age but changed little with increasing story…

Mothers' and fathers' beliefs and attitudes regarding pretend play were examined as a function of whether their children had imaginary companions and their children's gender. Parents (73 mothers, 40 fathers) were surveyed about their children's pretend play, their attitudes toward pretense, and the environments they provided for their children's…

Differences between children's self-ratings of shyness and ratings made by their teachers and primary caregivers were investigated in a sample of 90 self-reported shy schoolchildren between 10 and 12 years of age. Analyses revealed that correlations between children's own shyness ratings and those made by parents or teachers were low to moderate,…

Prosocial behavior encompasses sympathetic, helpful, and caring responses toward others. Temperamental characteristics and experiences of child rearing are associated with children's prosocial behavior. However, little research has examined the associations between prosocial behavior and either temperamental inhibition or paternal child rearing.…

The present study investigated the causes to which parents attribute their children's academic successes and failures during children's transition from preschool to primary school. It followed 182 mothers and 167 fathers of 207 children. The parents completed a questionnaire concerning their causal attributions, level of education, and parenting…

Mental state language during conversations about the past was assessed in a short-term longitudinal study. Twenty-one mother-child dyads discussed several previously experienced events when the children were 30 and 42 months old. Over time, children's mental term use--although quite low--did increase, and both mothers and children talked more…

Consistent with the bidirectional perspective on parent-child relations, the current study examined children's perceptions of agency in the context of marital conflict. A storytelling task was completed by 11 5 five-year-old children, tapping perceived agency. These children and their mothers and fathers completed measures of marital conflict at…

Using a longitudinal design, we investigated the relation of childhood personality type to volunteering during adolescence. We hypothesized that participants with more adaptive personality functioning during childhood would be more likely to volunteer during adolescence and that membership in social organizations would mediate the relation of…

Harry Stack Sullivan maintained that competition between friends in early adolescence would generally destroy their friendship. Working with early adolescent samples in Canada, Costa Rica, and Cuba, we found that hypercompetitiveness--a form of competition involving the need to prove one?s own superiority--was linked with conflict between friends,…