Relations of maladjustment with negative emotionality often were found within context—that is, when reporters in a given setting provided information on both maladjustment and temperament (although this was less often true for analyses predicting control versus co-occurring status; see Table 5). Such findings are not unusual. For example, Rydell et al. (2003) found that parents’ reports of children’s fearfulness were related to internalizing problems at home but not at preschool or elementary school. The lack of findings across contexts may be partly because teachers’ and parents’ reports of negative emotionality generally were not correlated (there was modest agreement on anger at T1). Lack of agreement about children’s negative emotionality is a common finding (Goldsmith, Rieser-Danner, & Briggs, 1991; Verhulst & Akkerhuis, 1989) and may be due to differences in teachers’ and parents’ perspectives, teachers’ lesser awareness of children’s negative emotions (especially with age of the child), or differences in the emotions children actually experience or display in different contexts.
