INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND PERSONALITY

Individual Differences and Personality, Emotions and Mental Health in Childhood

Individual Differences and Personality, Emotions and Mental Health in Childhood

Childhood Individual Differences and personality

The evaluation of individual statements of crime witnesses is a task that has been performed by German psychologists for legal courts in the last 40 years in estimated tens of thousands of cases. The methodology employed relies extensively on Criteria-Based Content Analysis (Gross & Levenson, 1993, 970-986) which was developed in Germany and Sweden from the 1950s. According to the "Undeutsch hypothesis", subjectively truthful experience-based reports will differ in a wide range of aspects, the "reality criteria", from fabricated accounts of events that were not actually experienced. This intuition has been recently validated in a number of field studies and experimental simulations in which marked differences were found between truthful reports and fictitious stories on most of the 19 criteria currently in use (Gross & Levenson, 1993, 970-986).

The rationale underlying CBCA as an evidentiary tool is its ability to discriminate between two rivaling hypotheses concerning the origin of the statement: a "reality hypothesis" and the alternative hypothesis claiming that the statement is an intentional construction. The expert's task in statement evaluation is to gather information and arrive at a rational decision between these hypotheses not by an assessment of the dispositional honesty or truthfulness of the witness but by applying the reality criteria to that specific statement.

Individual parents have unique levels of personal resources stemming from cumulative effects of up-bringing, education, employment, and mental health, for instance. Therefore, parents bring themselves to the parenting equation—including their own developmental stage. The lifespan developmental model emerged in the 1970s and is built on the premise that human development is a lifelong process. Parents, therefore, are at a specific point in their own growth as they face their child's continually changing needs. For instance, mothers may be negotiating their own new identity as "homemaker" or "career woman" as they make decisions about bedtimes, child care, or nutrition. Similarly, marriages evolve over time. Marital happiness and stability is a good predictor of parenting quality whether or not parents fight in front of children. Marital discord can be draining emotionally and financially taxing, and may present many unique complications in between. These factors in the socioemotional lives of parents represent very real barometers of what parents have to give to child rearing (Gross & Levenson, 1993, 970-986).

In a similar vein, children bring to the careful dance of child rearing their own individual selves complete with desires, habits, and temperament. Temperament is the biological preparedness infants bring into the world that predisposes them to deal with social, cognitive, and perceptual challenges in particular ways. Children's responses to such challenges play a significant role in adaptation to their environment. During the 1990s there was increasing recognition that children's individual differences in a variety of behaviors shape the way parents respond to children. For instance, infants with difficult temperament are thought to elicit more arousal and distress from caregivers than their less difficult ...