Education Commons^™

Temperament And Personality In Preschoolers: Are The Concepts The Same Or Different?, Cathy Grist Litty

Doctoral Dissertations

Individual differences among adults have generally been conceptualized in terms of personality theory and traits and attributed more to life experiences and conditioning than innate dispositions. In contrast, to the more limited extent that individual differences among young children (birth to kindergarten) have been recognized and studied, they have generally been conceptualized in terms of temperament theory and traits, attributed to innate biological programming than to experience.

Recent developments in the field of personality theory begin to blur this distinction, suggesting that individual differences even in young children can be productively studied from the standpoint of personality traits. Specifically, the …