Social Development in Infancy: Roles of Temperament and Attachment Temperament represents a set of inherent qualities of an individual that affect the organization of his or her behavior. Most experts agree that temperament has a biological basis justified by factors such as genetic influences, but they disagree on temperament’s strict definition or what are its basic dimensions. However, one of the most prominent methods for measuring temperament based on Mary Rothbart’s three dimensions of temperament, the Infant Behavior Questionnaire, asks parents about 10-16 questions designed to explore differences in emotions, attention, and action over an infant’s first year of life. The purpose of this exploration is to measure an infant’s positive reactivity as surgency or extraversion, negative reactivity as …show more content…
Appropriate development of temperament establishes an infant’s social skills. For example, high levels of both positive and negative reactivity in infancy have shown to compromise the development of effortful control later in the infant’s life. These levels of reactivity essentially halt the infant’s growth of voluntary regulation delaying tasks such as planning actions. Each stage of development allows the infant to build more complex processes over the first year, such as how negative affectivity allows an infant to differentiate fear from generalized distress seen as hesitation around the third month. The development of temperament, especially during infancy, regulates one’s emotional reactivity through voluntary action towards external stimulus in social environments. Attachment, as described by John Bowlby’s attachment theory, suggests children are born