La valutazione del temperamento infantile: osservazioni dirette e indirette delle espressioni emotive nel primo anno di vita

The study is aimed to examine individual differences in the expression of emotionsof joy, anger, interest, fear, and in the level of activity of children in the first year of life, bymeans of a multi-method approach based on the use of an instrument for direct observation, theLab-TAB (Goldsmith and Rothbart, 1999), and of an instrument for indirect observation, the questionnaireIBQ-R (Montirosso et al., 2011). Data from direct observations were coded through twodifferent coding systems: molecular and global. The study was also aimed to verify whether theresults obtained with the two coding systems converged with each other and with those obtainedwith the questionnaire. The cluster analysis performed on data collected through the molecularcoding allowed to identify five temperamental profiles that match only partially to those thatemerged from the global coding of the observations and questionnaires. The data also show thatthe Lab-TAB scores obtained with the two coding systems – global and molecular – convergedwith each other, but did not correlate significantly with the scores of the same dimensions of temperamentdetected by the IBQ-R.