Relations among behavioral inhibition, Big Five personality factors, and anxiety disorder symptoms in non-clinical children

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Abstract

This study examined relationships between behavioral inhibition, Big Five personality factors, and anxiety disorder symptoms in non-clinical children aged 9–12 years (N = 226), using children’s self-report and parent-report data. Results indicated that behavioral inhibition is best characterized by low extraversion with a tinge of neuroticism. Further, behavioral inhibition was clearly associated with anxiety symptoms, even when controlling for the influence of Big Five personality factors (including neuroticism). These results indicate that although behavioral inhibition partly overlaps with basic personality factors, this temperament characteristic remains an important predictive variable of anxiety pathology in youths.

Introduction

‘Behavioral inhibition to the unfamiliar’ can be regarded as a temperamental typology that is characterized by the tendency of children and adolescents to be unusually shy and to react with fear and withdrawal in novel, unknown, or challenging situations (Kagan, 1994).1 Approximately 10% of young children clearly exhibit the signs of behavioral inhibition, and continue to display these characteristics during later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood (Kagan & Snidman, 2004). From a psychopathology perspective, behavioral inhibition is of interest because various studies have demonstrated that this temperament feature is associated with the development of anxiety symptoms (see for a review: Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005). For example, longitudinal research by Biederman and colleagues (1993) has shown that behaviorally inhibited preschool children were more likely to develop serious anxiety problems during a 3-year follow-up period as compared to non-inhibited control children. Not only social phobia, but also separation anxiety disorder and multiple anxiety disorders were significantly more prevalent among children with behavioral inhibition. In view of these and other research findings, it is not surprising that contemporary models on the etiology of childhood anxiety disorders include behavioral inhibition as an important factor increasing children’s vulnerability to develop such emotional problems (Muris, 2007).

Some authors have argued that behavioral inhibition is the observable manifestation of the fundamental personality trait of neuroticism (e.g., Craske, 1997), which can be defined as the enduring tendency to experience negative emotional states (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003). Indeed individuals who score high on neuroticism tend to respond more intensely to environmental stressors and often are self-conscious and shy, thereby exhibiting some of the classical signs of behavioral inhibition. Another basic personality trait that has been associated with behavioral inhibition is extraversion. More precisely, individuals who score low on extraversion engage less in social activities, are less assertive, and prefer to observe situations before they participate (Matthews et al., 2003), which of course strongly resembles the behavioral pattern that is so typical for behavioral inhibition. Thus, the temperamental typology of behavioral inhibition essentially seems to reflect a mixture of the personality traits of (high) neuroticism and (low) extraversion. So far, the empirical evidence for this notion is sparse and primarily coming from research in adult populations (Muris et al., 2007, Shatz, 2005).

Moreover, because behavioral inhibition has rarely been investigated in combination with neuroticism and extraversion, it remains unclear whether this temperament characteristic accounts for unique variance in anxiety symptoms beyond these basic personality traits. This is particularly relevant given the fact that some authors (e.g., Eysenck, 1967) have proposed that individual differences in vulnerability to anxiety are grounded on a combination of high neuroticism and low extraversion (see also Craske, 2003).

With these issues in mind, the current study was conducted. Non-clinical children aged 9–12 years completed self-report scales for measuring behavioral inhibition, Big Five personality traits (including neuroticism and extraversion), and anxiety disorder symptoms. In this way, it became possible to investigate (a) correlations among behavioral inhibition, personality traits, and anxiety disorder symptoms, (b) to what extent neuroticism, extraversion, and other personality traits account for unique variance in behavioral inhibition, and (c) whether behavioral inhibition accounts for unique variance in anxiety disorder symptoms after controlling for Big Five personality traits. As parents2 filled out similar questionnaires to assess levels of behavioral inhibition, personality factors, and anxiety symptoms in their children, it became also possible to examine the same research issues from the parents’ perspective.

Section snippets

Participants

Parents of 377 schoolchildren of three primary schools in the neighborhood of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were approached by mail. In the letter, parents received information about the study and were asked to give their consent about their child’s participation. In addition, they were invited to complete parent versions of the questionnaires (see below) and to return materials in a sealed envelope. Two-hundred-and-fifty parents (66.3%) responded positively to the mailing. Children of these

General statistics

Before discussing the main results of the present study, a number of general findings should be discussed. First, all questionnaires were reliable in terms of internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alphas varying between .75 and .93. Further, significant sex differences were found for a number of variables. More specifically, girls rated themselves as more behaviorally inhibited [means being 95.84, SD = 22.41 vs. 88.38, SD = 22.19; t(224) = 2.51, p < .05] and anxious [means being 29.38, SD = 17.34 vs.

Discussion

The present study investigated relationships among behavioral inhibition, Big Five personality factors, and anxiety disorder symptoms in non-clinical children aged 9–12 years. In keeping with Shatz (2005) and Muris et al. (2007), this research demonstrates that the temperament characteristic of behavioral inhibition is predominantly characterized by low levels of the Big Five personality factor of extraversion. This does not mean that behavioral inhibition merely reflects low extraversion. Low

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