Rothbart Temperament Scales – Infant, Early Childhood, Child

Three higher‐order temperament factors pertinent to the assessment of emotional expressiveness and regulation have been isolated: (a) negative affectivity, (b) surgency; and (c) effortful control (Rothbart et al, 1994). Taken together, they comprise a child's constitutional, individual pattern of self‐regulation and reactivity, relatively enduring biological predispositions that are influenced over time by maturation and experience. Negative affectivity items involve discomfort experienced in over‐stimulating situations, frustration, anger, and inability to soothe oneself, fearfulness, and sadness. The Surgency dimension includes active, approach, pleasure, and smiling scales. Use of Rothbart Temperament Questionnaires can add to knowledge of children’s expressiveness across many everyday contexts. Many children high on the temperament dimension of negative affectivity are easily angered in many situations. Others high on this dimension are anxious, fearful in new situations, and easily saddened. Thus, this factor can be divided into “externalizing negative emotions” and “internalizing negative emotions.” Effortful control, also assessed by the CBQ, is associated with sensitivity to the emotional experiences of peers, which can lead to empathic and other prosocial responses, as well as to inhibition of aggressive impulses (Kochanska, 1993; Rothbart et al., 1994). More specifically, regulatory abilities in attention, in particular the ability to focus and shift attention voluntarily, and the ability to disengage attention from one's own perspective to attend to another's, are hallmarks of prosocial development (Kochanska, 1993). Children higher on the effortful control dimension may be seen by teachers, observers, and peers alike as more socially competent. Effortful control encompasses scales measuring inhibitory control; maintenance of attentional focus during tasks; pleasure experienced during low intensity situations (e.g., looking at picture books); and perceptual sensitivity and awareness of external cues. Thus, the CBQ’s scales related to emotion regulation, or internally consistent abbreviations thereof, could be useful.

For regulation, four scales are used, as follows: (a) attention focusing (“will move from one task to another without completing them” (reversed); (b) attention shifting (“can easily shift from one activity to another”; (c) inhibition control (e.g., “can lower her voice when asked to do so; and (e) impulsivity (“rushes into new situations”).

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