Doreen Arcus

University of Massachusetts Lowell | UML · Department of Psychology

A group of 193 children, classified as high or low reactive to stimulation at 4 months and observed again at 14 and 21 months, were observed at 4½ years of age for behavioral signs of inhibited or uninhibited behavior. Children who had been high reactive were less spontaneous and less sociable than those who had been classified as low reactive, but...

Student deaths from school shootings were examined across all 50 states according to the state’s policy on the use of corporal punishment in schools after controlling for associated differences in poverty rates and the prevalence of conservative Christian religions. There were significantly more school shooting deaths found in states allowing schoo...

The chapter discusses observations of two types of children who differ in their disposition toward inhibited or uninhibited reactions to conditions of novelty and uncertainty, without claim that the relations observed would extend to other temperamental categories or conceptualizations. Behavioral inhibition in childhood is discussed in terms of re...

Previously, we proposed a theoretical framework that classified infants into qualitative categories of reactivity, rather than on a continuous dimension. The present research used an objective statistical procedure (maximum covariance analysis, or MAXCOV) to determine if a qualitative latent structure, consistent with our theoretical conjectures, w...

A group of 193 children, classified as high or low reactive to stimulation at 4 months and observed again at 14 and 21 months, were observed at 4 1/2 years of age for behavioral signs of inhibited or uninhibited behavior. Children who had been high reactive were less spontaneous and less sociable than those who had been classified as low reactive,...

Galen's Prophecy [states] that much of human behavior can be predicted according to an individual's temperament. This postulate . . . inspired Jerome Kagan . . . to conduct an intensive 15 yr study [of infants and children] to determine whether or not an individual's temperament is predetermined by his or her physiological makeup. Describing the...

Measures of the temperature of the fingertips of eighty-three 4-year-old children revealed an unexpected asymmetry in which the index finger of the left hand but the ring finger of the right hand were the coolest digits. In addition, a subset of 20 children who had the coolest right compared with the left ring finger were more fearful to unfamiliar...

High levels of circulating glucocorticoids in fetal animals are associated with inhibited development of the lateral processes of the maxilla, or upper jaw, as these bones grow toward midline union early in gestation. This inhibition can prevent fusion and lead to the formation of cleft palate. Mouse strains are differentially susceptible to this e...

Temperamental characteristics can be conceptualised as continuous dimensions or qualitative categories. The continuous versus categorical question concerns the underlying temperamental characteristics and not the measured variables, which can be recorded in either continuous or categorical forms. This paper argues for a categorical conceptualisatio...

Measures of heart rate and forehead temperature on 238, 21-month-old children exposed to mild laboratory stressors revealed 2 provocative results. More children were cooler on the left side of the forehead than on the right side of the forehead, and those with a cooler left side of the forehead had lower heart rates. These data suggest that some as...

433 4-mo-old infants from Boston, Dublin, and Beijing were administered the same battery of visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli to evaluate differences in levels of reactivity. The Chinese Ss were significantly less active, irritable, and vocal than the Boston and Dublin samples, with Boston Ss showing the highest level of reactivity. Data sugg...

Described 2 cohorts of longitudinal data concerned with early predictors of inhibited and uninhibited temperamental types of infants. There were 93 Ss in Cohort 1 and 76 Ss in Cohort 2. Ss were tested at 4 mo and at 14 mo of age to determine their reactions to changes in the intensity and variety of sensory stimuli and to assess fear of unfamiliar...