The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

Temperament, an important construct in developmental psychology and psychopathology research, is now gaining recognition as a crucial idea in the field of autism. This session will examine what temperament is, how temperament varies among children with ASD, and which temperament traits predict problem behavior. Further, the session will provide case examples for how temperament intervention techniques can be combined with current problem behavior interventions for children with ASD to maximize effectiveness. The study and discussion of temperament is crucial to highlight that children with ASD differ from one another in terms of their temperament, identify temperament characteristics that are more likely than others to lead to problem behavior, and to design individualized treatments for problem behavior.

What is temperament?
Temperament is a major focus of the literature on child development. Currently, theorists view temperament as individual differences in a child’s response to various situations in their self-regulation of attention, emotion, and activity (Rothbart & Bates, 2006). In this framework temperament is summarized in terms of three factors: negative affectivity, surgency, and effortful control. Each of these factors, in turn, can be broken down into various constructs to generate more detailed information about an individual’s or group’s temperamental characteristics (Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001). Case examples illustrating temperament characteristics will be given.

Does temperament vary among children with ASD?
Research and clinical case examples often focus on differences between children with ASD and typical children but do not focus on differences among children with ASD. This may be an issue of diagnostic overshadowing, that is, attributing every behavior, or in this case, temperamental trait to the child’s diagnosis, rather than considering other potential causes (Reiss, Levitan, & Szyszko, 1982). This session will present current data that shows great temperamental variability among children with ASD. This important contribution of showing temperamental variability will help researchers, clinicians, and parents alike recognize that each child with ASD has unique temperament characteristics that ought not to be overshadowed or ignored because of the presence of the ASD diagnostic label. Further it highlights the importance of individualized behavior support plans.

Which temperamental traits predict problem behavior in children with ASD?
This session will review questionnaire and observational data from the authors’ current research showing that high surgency, low effortful control, and high negative affectivity predict externalizing problem behaviors (e.g. aggression, tantrum, self-injury).

How do we incorporate temperament into current assessment and intervention practices?
There are various ways to assess temperament including parent or teacher report questionnaire, naturalistic observations, and laboratory observations. For the purpose of problem behavior intervention, the most convenient temperament assessment is a questionnaire that can be used at home or in the classroom. One widely used questionnaire is the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart et al., 2001). Participants will discuss sample questions from this questionnaire.    
In order to use temperament assessment to inform intervention practices intervention agents must understand three key temperament terms; set-point, goodness of fit, and niche picking.  Set point is “a personal baseline that remains constant over time” (Fujita & Diener, 2005).  Applied to temperament, set point can be understood as a child’s average way of behaving based on his/her genetic predisposition to various temperament characteristics. Similarly, in the study of children’s temperament, various medical, behavioral, and educational interventions might alter undesirable temperament characteristics within a small range around the set point but would not drastically shift temperament characteristics far from the set point. “Goodness-of-fit” refers to how well a child’s temperament matches the situation with which he/she has to cope (Chess & Thomas, 1991). If activities or situations are a poor fit with a child’s temperament, problem behavior will likely occur. Niche picking is defined as choosing a situation that best fits an individual’s temperament (Super & Harkness, 1994). Typical children often self select a niche (i.e. football team vs. chess team) that is a good fit for his/her temperament. Children with autism, however, are often unable to pick their own niche because of demands placed on them by parents and teachers and because of difficulty communicating their wants and needs. Thus, niche-picking interventions for children with autism require parents and staff to assess a child’s temperament and then choose niches that are likely to be a good fit for the child and structure academic and home demands to be congruent with this niche.
Within a behavioral paradigm, a four-term contingency (setting event-discriminative stimulus-behavior-consequence) is often used to understand problem behavior in children who have autism. Temperament can be conceptualized as a biological setting event. Three general strategies are commonly used with children who have ASD to target the contextual variables (setting events and discriminative stimuli) that typically evoke problem behavior (Carr et al., 1994; Horner, Day, & Day, 1997; Luiselli & Cameron, 1998). These strategies are (1) avoid the context associated with problem behavior; (2) mitigate the stimulus properties of the context associated with problem behavior; (3) teach skills to allow children to cope with the context.  These strategies can be integrated with niche picking in order to (1) avoid niches that are a poor fit with a child’s temperament; (2) mitigate the stimulus properties of niches that are a poor fit with a child’s temperament in order to make them a better fit for a child’s temperament; (3) teach new skills that allow children to cope with niches that are a poor fit for their temperament. To illustrate these intervention strategies, the presenters will provide clinical case examples of children with various temperament profiles and corresponding problem behavior intervention strategies.

Learning Objectives: