Clues to your personality appeared before you could talk

Your personality has been sculpted by many hands. Your genes, your friends, the schools you
attended, plus many other factors, will all have played a part in making you the person you are today.
But when exactly did your own distinct character first begin to take shape? If you’re a shy person now,
for instance, does that mean you were a shy child?
In all likelihood, yes. In fact, research suggests there are significant links between our behavioural
tendencies when we’re just a few months old and our later personality. That isn’t to say that our
personality was set in stone that early, but that the roots of who we are can be traced all the way
back to our earliest days.
Psychologists who study babies usually refer to “temperament” rather than personality.
One 1950s study found that most children fall into three categories - easy, difficult, and 'slow to
warm-up'
Although infant temperament doesn’t completely forecast later personality, the two are certainly
connected.
Do these childhood categories presage later personality types? The New York study found some
evidence that children categorised as easy or difficult at age three also tended to be categorised the
same way in early adulthood, but the research didn’t examine links between child temperament and
adult personality, as such.
In fact, for a long time psychologists studying infant temperament and those studying adult
personality didn’t have a great deal to do with each other. Increasingly over the last decade or so,
however, that has begun to change and although infant temperament doesn’t completely forecast later
personality, the two are certainly connected.
Note that the scoring systems for infant temperament have changed over time. Today the original nine
aspects of temperament are distilled into just three broad dimensions (unfortunately psychology labs
often vary in the precise terms they use): “Effortful control” which describes things like the infant’s
self-control and ability to focus (resisting, for example, the lure of a tempting toy); “negative
affectivity, which as it sounds, refers to levels of negative emotion like fear and frustration; and
“extraversion” or “surgency”, which is to do with activity levels, excitement and being sociable.
In a study, published in 2007, researchers in the Czech Republic took measures of infancy
temperament a little later, between the ages of 12 and 30 months, and found an association, albeit
very specific, with personality traits in the same individuals when they were tested again 40 years
later.
If the child is the father of the man, then the toddler is a close relative.
The two traits in question were toddler disinhibition (similar to the more widely used
extraversion/surgency rating) and adult extraversion. That is, the more active and assertive the
participants had been as toddlers, the more likely they were to score highly on extraversion as adults,
and on self-efficacy (our belief in our own abilities). If the child is the father of the man (to quote poet
William Wordsworth), then the researchers said they would like to add “… toddler is a close relative”.
It’s worth remembering when reading about these findings that our personalities, although they show
consistency through life, are also constantly evolving and it would be impossible to pinpoint any one
moment when a person’s personality in their youth had taken on its adult form (apart from anything,
this would depend on which version of their maturing adult personality you had in mind). However,
as an infant grows into a small child, their personality is gradually crystallising. Wait until a child is
aged three, for example, and now their behaviour will even more strongly foretell the adult
personality.
Take the findings from a paper published in 2003, in which researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry
in London compared the behavioural scores of over a thousand three-year-olds taken in 1975-1976
(based on which they classified the children as either “well-adjusted”, “under-controlled”, “confident”,
“inhibited” or “reserved”) with the same individuals’ personality scores recorded when they were 26.
This time many striking consistencies emerged through the nearly three-decade period of study – to
take just one example, the “confident” children became the most extraverted adults, and the inhibited
children became the least extraverted.
Anyone who has young children of their own, or spends time with them, knows that it’s tempting to
look for signs of emerging personality traits in a baby’s giggle or frown. The latest psychology
research suggests such speculation might not be entirely in vain.
But there’s also a serious side to this field. Increasingly, researchers are realising that the roots of
adult psychological problems may lie in behavioural tendencies that first appear in early childhood.
By learning to recognise these signs, it might be possible to intervene carefully at an early age and to
help steer children on the path to a healthier future.

Source: BBC