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5 - Personality types in childhood and adolescence: main effects and person-relationship transactions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

By
Marcel A. G. van Aken ,
Cornelis F. M. van Lieshout ,
Ron H. J. Scholte  and
Gerbert J. T. Haselager
Edited by
Lea Pulkkinen  and
Avshalom Caspi
Lea Pulkkinen
Affiliation:
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Avshalom Caspi
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, London
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Summary

Personality development and its consequences for the functioning of individuals over the life-span has recently received a lot of interest. A full chapter in the new edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology (Caspi, 1998) was devoted to the topic, as was a special issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Diener, 2000). In addition, attempts have been made to broaden the focus of personality research with developmental issues, for example by adapting the Big Five framework to fit the study of childhood and adolescence (Halverson, Kohnstamm, and Martin, 1994), and to connect this paradigm with the well-established tradition of research on children's temperament (Rothbart, Ahadi, and Evans, 2000). In this chapter, we will focus on a recent development in the study of personality in childhood and adolescence, namely the study of personality types. We will present data on the social relationships of these types, and the way type membership and relationships interact in determining psychosocial functioning in childhood and adolescence.

Ego-resiliency and ego-control

As recently noted in several reviews of the literature (Caspi, 1998; Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, and Reiser, 2000; Rothbart and Bates, 1998), there is increasing recognition that the constructs of temperament and personality overlap, and that early temperamental differences are the substrate of personality. This overlap becomes particularly clear when the definition of temperament from the work of Rothbart is followed (see also van Lieshout, 2000).

Type
Chapter
Information
Paths to Successful Development
Personality in the Life Course
 , pp. 129 - 156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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References

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