Prospective longitudinal studies from childhood into adulthood are needed to provide empirical documentation of how maladaptive personalty

traits are developed, sustained, altered, or remitted in their presentation across the life span (Caspi 1998; Lynam 1996; Sher and Trull 1996; Widiger and Sankis 2000). Ideally, the personality dispositions studied in adulthood would have conceptually meaningful and empirically valid relaionships to the behavior patterns and temperaments studied in childhood, and this integration might be achieved by a more dimensional model of personality functioning (Digman 1994). For example, research has suggested that individuals with antisocial personality disorder demonstrate a hyporeactive electrodermal response to stress that is associated with a commonly studied domain of normal personality functioning, neuroticism, or negative affectivity (Patrick 1994; Patrick et al. 1993). This research might be consistent with the developmental research on the interaction of parentng and fundamental temperaments (e.g., low anxiousness and low inhibiion) on the development of a moral conscience (Kochanska 1991). From his perspective, the pathology of psychopathy might not be a deficit that s qualitatively distinct from general personality functioning (Widiger and Lynam 1998). The observed absence of startle potentiation in psychopaths (Patrick et al. 1993) may reflect a temperamental deficit in the capacty for negative affect (Patrick 1994, p. 325). There has been substantial research on the contributions of sexual and psychological abuse to the etiology of borderline personality disorder Gunderson and Sabo 1993; Zanarini 2000). Linehan (1993) has hypothesized that borderline personality disorder is the result of a heritable temperament of emotional instability interacting with a severely invalidating e.g., abusive) environment. However, the broad diagnostic category of borderline personality disorder may not capture well the specific traits or emperament that is especially vulnerable to abusive and stressful experi-

ences. Perhaps this research could be integrated with existing developmental studies of the interaction of parenting and temperament (e.g., Kochanska 1991; Rothbart and Ahadi 1994).