Several theories maintain that temperament, personality, or individual differences in behavior are rooted in emotions. The present longitudinal study of sixty-three normal children supported this premise. We found substantial stability from early infancy to age two years for a broad range of emotion-related variables—objectively coded emotion expressions, indexes of cardiac functioning, mother's ratings of temperament. Indexes of these variables provide an early window on the development of stable individual traits. Emotion variables measured in early infancy predicted temperament scores at thirteen, eighteen, and twenty-four months of age.
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