Abstract
Temperament is a controversial psychological construct and widely used in many fields such as childhood, adult, clinics, health and education. The current theories and its applications of temperament in our country overlooked the emotional aspects of temperament’s psychological characteristics. No measurement tool and no relevant research to emotional characteristics of temperament exist. As a result, we developed the questionnaire on children’s and adolescents’ emotional characteristics of temperament and administered it to children and adolescents in Shanghai. We enriched the connotation of the original “emotional excitability” of temperament, forming the six secondary indexes and named them as emotional characteristics of temperament. The six secondary indexes were as follows: (1) sensitivity of emotional excitability, (2) strength of emotional excitability, (3) generation speed of emotional excitability, (4) changing speed of emotional excitability, (5) controllability of emotional excitability and (6) explicitness of emotional excitability. These indexes were corresponding to the active characteristics of temperament. The connotations of these indexes were mentioned below: (1) Sensitivity of emotional excitability reflected people’s difficulty difference of emotion generation; (2) Strength of emotional excitability reflected people’s strength difference of generated emotions; (3) Generation speed of emotional excitability reflected people’s speed difference of emotion generation; (4) Changing speed of emotional excitability reflected people’s changing speed difference between different emotions or different emotion degrees; (5) Controllability of emotional excitability reflected people’s controllability difference of emotions; (6) Explicitness of emotional excitability reflected people’s explicitness difference of emotions.
The questionnaire was administered to 5831 students from Shanghai, including primary school students (fourth-grade and fifth-grade), junior school students, senior high school students and undergraduates (vocational college students and university students).
The results showed: (1) The questionnaire meets the criteria of an effective measurement tool and serves as an original investigative tool for affective diathesis of college students. (2) In every schooling stage (primary school, junior school, senior high school and college), emotion generation of females was faster than males. (3) Emotion changing speed of primary school students, junior school students and senior high school students was faster than that of undergraduates; and emotion was more explicit for primary school students, junior school students and senior high school students than for undergraduates. (4) Emotion was more controllable and more explicit for university students than for vocational college students. (5) Emotional excitability of art students were more sensitive, stronger, faster, changing faster and more explicit than those of science students.
All in all, temperament is neither good nor bad; the same is the emotional characteristics of temperament. But knowing one’s emotional characteristics of temperament conveniently and accurately can lead us to give more targeted help and build more effective communication with him/her. From this study, we know the emotional characteristics of temperament have stability and development at the same time. In addition, knowing students' emotional characteristics of temperament may also provide useful information for their career choice and future plan.
Key words
temperament /
emotion /
emotional characteristics of temperament /
questionnaire
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An Investigation of Emotional Characteristics of Temperament in 5831 Students’ from Primary School to College[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2017, 40(3): 572-580
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