Many researches report the roles of temperament to explain psychopathology particularly in child psychopathology. Does anyone know the researches that deliverd in this area? And are there tools and scales for assessing temperament in OCD?
How do you mean 'temperament'? If you're talking about personality, then the MMPI2 is a very widely used and well documented personality inventory (though it is long). If you want to assess OCD symptomatology, then the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale is a commonly used instrument with good psychometric properties.
A good place to start would be the link between temperament (specifically behavioral inhibition) and anxiety. Work in this area by Nathan Fox, Koraly Perez-Edgar, and others shows genetic and physiological links between them. It also seems likely that persistence (at high levels) and distractibility (at low levels) would be predictive of later OCD-type behaviors or diagnosis, but I am not aware of research on those specific links. There are a couple of helpful chapters in the Handbook of Temperament (2012; Zentner & Shiner, Eds), including "Temperament and Internalizing Disorders" by Klein, Dyson, Kujawa, & Kotov.
Temperament is important for each of us to learn about. The nine temperament traits revealed by researches of Thomas, Chess and Birch are partly genetic. We all need to know our temperament traits. Not just OCD folks!. These traits are: Activity level ( high or lower); Mood; Approach-avoidance of new ( things, persons, activities, foods; places); Threshold of tolerance for stress or distress; Intensity level of response when a person is stressed; Persistence at tasks; Ease or difficulty in adjusting to a stressor such a failing a test; a scolding, divorce,losing a job -whatever the stressor is); Rhythmicity or lack of every-day consistency in voiding, sleeping, eating; and Ability to attend to and focus on an activity or task.
A child or adult with ADHD may need to plan for physical activities to give a break when focus is lost after 10 minutes or so when the person is taking a test, for example. Helping that ADHD person to do isometrics or physical activities may permit a refocus so that person can succeed at tests or tasks. Also, one can see that an OCD person may have intense ability to focus attention and persist over and over to a degree that results in deep knowledge of one subject, but that interferes with more normative daily skills needed to get along with others or do class assignments, for example. However, that intense focus may be useful for some activates that require extreme perseverance in the face of discouragement or failure. Also, although a person may be feel very aversive toward the "new" , yet that person may be able to stay at a boring job for longer. .
The more one is able to tune into the degree of each of the temperament traits, and how they cluster into three major categories: Easy, Slow-to-warm up; and Feisty/ triggery/impulsive, intense) the more fine -tuned can be the therapeutic help one gives a client. And we can each gain more insights into our own behaviors too!
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