Research on child personality and its development

Thanking you for your interest in participating in this research, we would like to provide you with some general information about the purpose of this project and the compilation of the tools used.

This works, first of all, aims to investigate the existence of emerging patterns of child’s personality and to evaluate the possible evolutionary trajectories of these patterns.

Personality is a complex construct enclosing the set of charateristics of thought, sentiment, motivation and behaviour that define the core of individual differences. The investigation into this construct has always addressed the adult and the disorders that occur at this age. In fact, it has always been considered that children did not showed clinically relevant stable traits that could be studied, because they are still in the midst of developing. This is partly true; however, in the most recent scientific literature there are lot of studies and consistent empirical evidence which suggest that specific emerging patterns of both adaptive and misfit personalities are detectable early.

- between 4 and 11 years old;

- in consultation/assessment or treatment for disadactive and lasting patterns of thought, feeling, motivation or behavior (personality).

For example, the child may have anxiety problems, mood or phobias; moderate or severe traits of withdrawal and inhibition; obsessions and/or paranoia; behavioral problems; neurodevelopment disorders; pre-psychotic or pre-autistic characteristics.

Children with moderate to severe intellectual disability or autistic syndromes, psychopharmacological treatment and psychotic syndromes MUST BE EXCLUDED.

For the assessment you can consider the child’s observation, the parent-child interaction’s observation, the interviews with the parents, the administration of tests, etc.

The goal of the questions we will ask you is to understand in detail some of the main characteristics of the child and the relationship with his/her parents.