中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: We investigated the associations between temperamental factors and anxiety and depression tendencies, and also compared temperamental differences between groups with various degrees of anxiety and depression tendencies. Methods: A total of 689 children (319 boys and 370 girls) aged 8 to 10 years were recruited for this study from August 2012 to October 2012. The measures included the Temperament in Middle Childhood Questionnaire (TMCQ) and the Beck Youth Inventory-Second Edition (BIY-II). Parents completed the TMCQ at home and their children completed the BIY-II at school. Analyses were conducted using Pearson product-moment correlational analysis, multiple regression analysis, and one-way MANOVAs. Results: Children with higher level of negative affect and lower level of extraversion/surgency tended to have a higher tendency toward for anxiety and depression. Attentional focusing and perceptual sensitivity of effortful control could predict a tendency for both anxiety and depression tendency. Compared to the other three groups, children with a lower tendency for anxiety/lower depression tendency, showed a significantly lower level of negative affectivity. Conclusions: It is recommended that mental health professionals use temperament questionnaires as a tool to understand the characteristics of children. Parents, caregivers, and teachers can use them to identify ways to enhance children’s emotion regulation ability, facilitate their attentional focus, and reduce their perceptual sensitivity in order to mitigate the potential development of anxiety and depression. Future studies should establish Taiwan norms for the TMCQ and examine its psychometric properties. Longitudinal studies should be used to explore the predictive power of specific temperamental factors for childhood emotional problems with the goal of designing ways to help high-risk children regulate, adjust, or modify their temperament to prevent possible development of emotional problems.