Infant temperament predicts personality more than 20 years later

Monday, April 20, 2020

Behavioral inhibition in infancy associated with introversion and internalizing psychopathology in adulthood

Researchers investigating how temperament shapes adult life-course outcomes have found that behavioral inhibition in infancy predicts a reserved, introverted personality at age 26. For those individuals who show sensitivity to making errors in adolescence, the findings indicated a higher risk for internalizing disorders (such as anxiety and depression) in adulthood. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides robust evidence of the impact of infant temperament on adult outcomes.

“While many studies link early childhood behavior to risk for psychopathology, the findings in our study are unique,” said Daniel Pine, M.D., a study author and chief of the NIMH Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience. “This is because our study assessed temperament very early in life, linking it with outcomes occurring more than 20 years later through individual differences in neural processes.”

Temperament refers to biologically based individual differences in the way people emotionally and behaviorally respond to the world. During infancy, temperament serves as the foundation of later personality. One specific type of temperament, called behavioral inhibition (BI), is characterized by cautious, fearful, and avoidant behavior toward unfamiliar people, objects, and situations. BI has been found to be relatively stable across toddlerhood and childhood, and children with BI have been found to be at greater risk for developing social withdrawal and anxiety disorders than children without BI.