Infants have their own personalities: The Influence of Temperament Across Child Development

with Nathan Fox, Ph.D.

This webinar was presented live on October 1st, 2021 via registration. If you were unable to attend the live event, the recording is posted here.

Webinar Presented by Nathan Fox, Ph.D.

Nathan A. Fox is a distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He has completed research on the biological bases of social and emotional behavior developing methods for assessing brain activity in infants and young children during tasks designed to elicit a range of emotions. His work on the temperamental antecedents of anxiety is funded by the National Institutes of Health where he was awarded a MERIT award for excellence of this research program. He is an elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development and the Distinguished Mentor Award and G. Stanley Hall Award for Lifelong Achievement in Developmental Science from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association. He is also the recipient in 2017 of the Ruane Award for Outstanding Research in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He is a founding member of the National Scientific Council for the Developing Child and is co-Scientific Director of this group. In his talk, he will talk about how from the early months of life, infants react and respond to people and events in their environment with their own unique style. These individual differences in temperament influence the way caregivers respond to their infant and shape the infant’s developing personality. He will describe how we assess infant temperament and how the environment is shaped and shaped these styles of behavior. He will focus on one temperament, Behavioral Inhibition, and how it may confer risk for anxious behavior later in life.