Explorations In Temperament

The growing interest in research on temperament during the last decade has been re corded by several authors (e. g. , R. Plomin; J. E. Bates) from such sources of informa tion as the Social Sciences Citation Index or Psychological Abstracts. The editors' inquiry shows that the number of cases in which the term temperament was used in the title of a paper or in the paper's abstract published in Psychological Abstracts reveals an essential increase in research on temperament. During the years 1975 to 1979, the term temperament was used in the title and/or summary of 173 abstracts (i. e. , 34. 6 publications per year); during the next five years (1980-1984), it was used in 367 abstracts (73. 4 publications per year), whereas in the last five years (1985 to 1989), the term has appeared in 463 abstracts, that is, in 92. 6 publications per year. Even if the review of temperament literature is restricted to those abstracts, it can easily be concluded that temperament is used in different contexts and with different meanings, hardly allowing any comparisons or general statements. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that our knowledge on temperament does not cumulate despite the increasing research activity in this field. This situation in temperament research motivated the editors to organize a one week workshop on The Diagnosis of Temperament (Bielefeld, Federal Republic of Germany, September 1987).

Explorations in Personality, published by Oxford University Press in 1938, set forth a provocative and comprehensive agenda for the scientific study of human personality. Blending no-nonsense empiricism with the humanistic desire to understand the whole person, the book is as relevant to students of personality psychology today as it was to its many readers 70 years ago. Assisted by such eminent colleagues as Erik Erikson and Robert White, Henry Murray set forth a full theory of human personality, illustrated a bevy of creative methods for personality assessment, and presented the results of a landmark study of fifty Harvard men. Explorations in Personality is one of the great classics in 20th century psychology. This reissue, enhanced by Dan McAdams' foreword, which provides a contemporary evaluation of Murray's achievement, will be of great interest to students and researchers in personality psychology and to many other behavioral scientists, scholars, and general readers who wish to understand the psychology of the whole person.

In 1956 Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas launched the pioneering New York Longitudinal Study, a systematic investigation into the concept of temperament that has been pursued to the present decade. The findings from this study - that temperamental profiles of infants, children, adolescents, and adults show specific individual behavioral characteristics - are accepted as basic to the psychological mechanism of behavioral functioning. Now, these two preeminent authorities and teaches in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry present an essential introduction to their internationally recognized work. This volume takes the reader from concept - including the definition of temperament and the studies that support and expand upon that definition - to specific explorations of temperament and its impact across various practice settings and special populations.

Explorations in Personality, published by OUP in 1938, established an elaborate agenda for understanding our subjective human nature that is as relevant to students of personality psychology today as it was to its audience then. An antidote to the now fashionable strategy of representing a person as a dot on a scatter plot or burying the individual in an amalgam of statistics, it advocates 'whole person' research and bubbles with suggestions about how to perform such studies. IN addition, it actually executes with empirical and experimental rigor and ingenuity the kind of detailed, engrossing case study approach it recommends, recounting the results of a three-year long study of fifty college-age individuals. This book is, in short, a classic. This reissue, enhanced by Dan McAdams' foreword, which will provide a contemporary evaluation of Murray's achievement, will thus be of great interest to students and researchers in personality psychology in general, and personologists in particular.

First Published in 1986. The modern history of temperament research began in the late 1950s with the New York Longitudinal Study. Twenty-five years later, temperament has become a major focus of research on early developing emotional and social traits. The impetus for this growth in temperament research stems from the merging of several shifts in child development research: from a view of the child as passive to a model of the child as an active, transacting partner with the environment; increasing interest in individual differences in development; an expansion of research on emotional and social development; and a clear change from an exclusive reliance on environmental explanations of developmental differences to a more balanced perspective that recognizes the possibility of biological as well as environmental influences. Most stimulating is the multidisciplinary flavor of temperament research-clinicians, infancy researchers, cultural anthropologists, and behavioral geneticists have, each for their own reasons, been drawn to the study of temperament. Each of these fields is represented in the present volume, which provides the first overview of the growing field of temperament.