Most of the literature on personality and depression has focused on adolescents and adults. Research that is grounded in the child temperament literature in developmental psychology has the potential to extend existing work on personality in depression by (a) providing the strongest test of the precursor and predisposition models; (b) more precisely delineating the behavioral manifestations of temperamental vulnerabilities to mood disorders in young children; (c) tracing the development and continuity of trait vulnerabilities across the lifespan; and (d) examining the neurobiological, cognitive, and interpersonal processes that may mediate the association between early temperament traits and the subsequent development of depressive disorder (Compas et al. 2004, Klein et al. 2008a, Kovacs & Lopez-Duran 2010).
