The Global Temperament Project: Parent-reported temperament in infants, toddlers, and children from 59 nations.

Data from 83,423 parent reports of temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, and regulatory capacity) in infants, toddlers, and children from 341 samples gathered in 59 countries were used to investigate the relations among culture, gender, and temperament. Between-nation differences in temperament were larger than those obtained in similar studies of adult personality, and most pronounced for negative affectivity. Nation-level patterns of negative affectivity were consistent across infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, and patterns of regulatory capacity were consistent between infancy and toddlerhood. Nations that previously reported high extraversion, high conscientiousness, and low neuroticism in adults were found to demonstrate high surgency in infants and children, and countries reporting low adult openness and high adult neuroticism reported high temperamental negative affectivity. Negative affectivity was high in Southern Asia, Western Asia, and South America and low in Northern and Western Europe. Countries in which children were rated as high in negative affectivity had cultural orientations reflecting collectivism, high power distance, and short-term orientation. Surgency was high in Southeastern and Southern Asia and Southern Europe and low in Eastern Asian countries characterized by philosophies of long-term orientation. Low personal income was associated with high negative affectivity. Gender differences in temperament were largely consistent in direction with prior studies, revealing higher regulatory capacity in females than males and higher surgency in males than females, with these differences becoming more pronounced at later ages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Prenatal anticipatory stress: Baby preparation and worry scale-revised in the Dutch context.

BACKGROUND: Prenatal distress encompasses a range of different emotions, worries, and experiences of stress. The Baby Preparation and Worry Scale (Baby-PAWS) was recently developed to target anticipatory worries during pregnancy about the postnatal period. However, the Baby-PAWS questionnaire was only examined in the United States of America, limiting the questionnaire's generalizability to different countries. To address this issue, we performed a psychometric evaluation of the questionnaire in a Dutch sample and examined associations between the Baby-PAWS questionnaire and established measures of maternal distress (i.e., EPDS, STAI, PRAQ-R) and infant temperament (i.e., IBQ-R). METHODS: Healthy pregnant women (N = 521) completed questionnaires during their third trimester and postnatally, including the Baby-PAWS and distress measures. A subsample of mothers (N = 194) also reported on infant temperament at 12 weeks postpartum. RESULTS: Exploratory factor analysis suggested a four-factor structure for the 16-item questionnaire in our Dutch sample, as compared to the expected three-factor structure found in the original psychometric evaluation with the American sample. The total Baby-PAWS score was related to pre-and postnatal depression, anxiety, stress, and specific scales of infant temperament. American women scored higher on the Baby-PAWS items than Dutch women. LIMITATIONS: Our participants had higher-than-average socioeconomic status, limiting the generalizability of the findings. CONCLUSION: The current analyses indicate good validity of the Baby-PAWS in a Dutch sample. Furthermore, our results highlight cross-cultural differences in perinatal mental health and show the importance of examining instrument structure of context-dependent constructs, such as prenatal worries.