While looking for a topic to blog on, I did what any good student would do, I went to youtube.com and typed in "infant temperament" to see what I could find. The first video to catch my eye talked about a study done by a man named Jerome Kagan. Upon further research I discovered that Kagan is a big player in developmental psychology whose research in infant temperament is primarily focused on two categories, shy and outgoing infants. Which matched the video I watched perfectly. In the clip Kagan claims that at 4 months of age it is possible to tell what type of temperament a child will have by the age of 14 months. It is a simple study where a mobile is swayed to and fro in front of the infant and any reaction from the infant is noted.
The study has shown that the average child will occasionally move and show some excitement to the mobile, and by the age of 14 months the child should behave perfectly normal. However, should the child be overly relaxed, yet still excited or happy, about the mobile's movement, Kagan predicts that the child will be more outgoing later in life. Conversely, if the infant shows thrashing of the arms and legs, followed by a tantrum of sorts, that child will be overly anxious and shy 10 months later. This "test" has been shown by Kagan to work on over 300 infants.
Later in the video Kagan mentions a colleague of his, Nathan Fox, has been able to relate temperament to brain patterns in a similar study where he puts a cap on the infants head that reads brain activity. Then he has simple household occurrences performed in front of the infant. His study showed that the average infant had equal activity in the left and right sides of the brain, while shy and outgoing children show more activity in one side than the other.
Kagan adds the statement, "...our fate is not in our genes, biology is not our destiny..." Implying that temperament is neither nature nor nurture, but a combination of the two. I happen to agree with this statement, I believe that it has been shown throughout history, whenever there are two sides to an argument, both sides end up being right or wrong in the end. I thought this study was interesting because of how simple it was and how well it could predict a child's temperament at the same time.
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