 12. Personality Development in Middle Childhood  289
ness, disagreeableness, activity level, and a 
sensitivity factor that may be a precursor 
to openness (De Pauw, Mervielde, & Van 
Leeuwen, 2009). Moreover, the structure 
of the most widely used childhood tempera -
ment questionnaire—  the Children’s Be -
havior Questionnaire for children ages 3–7 
years—is characterized by more traits than 
just surgency, negative emotionality,  and 
effortful control  when analyzed using con -
temporary statistical techniques, thus sug -
gesting that more than three traits are neces -
sary to describe the breadth of these traits 
even before middle childhood (Kotelnikova, 
Olino, Klein, Kryski, & Hayden, 2016).
The “Little  Six”
Whereas research on temperament in child -
hood focuses on a narrower range of traits, 
personality research in childhood adopts a 
broader perspective on the traits that chil -
dren may display. There is robust evidence 
that, by middle childhood and perhaps ear -
lier, children’s personality traits take the 
form of the Big Five traits, with the possible 
addition of a sixth trait of activity level. 
Table 12.1  presents the facets (or mid-level 
constructs) for the Big Five traits in three 
of the most widely used personality trait 
measures for school-  age children: the Hier -
archical Personality Inventory for Children 
(HiPIC; Mervielde, De Fruyt, & De Clercq, 
2009); the Inventory of Child Individual 
Differences (ICID; Halverson et al., 2003; 
Tackett et al., 2012); and the Big Five Inven -
tory-2 (BFI-2; Soto & John, 2017). The facet 
traits in Table 12.1 illustrate the breadth of 
constructs included in the Big Five traits by 
middle childhood.
Two lines of questionnaire research in the 
personality tradition indicate that the Big 
Five model may capture many of the indi -
vidual differences in traits observed in chil -
dren. First, a number of questionnaires have 
been created specifically to measure the Big 
Five in children and adolescents via reports 
from parents and teachers. Some of these 
measures have used descriptors derived from 
parents’ free descriptions of their children 
rather than simply importing descriptors 
from adult measures, in order to increase 
the developmental validity of the measures; 
these measures include the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (HiPIC; 
Mervielde, De Fruyt, & De Clercq, 2009; 
Vollrath, Hampson, & Torgersen, 2016) and 
the Inventory of Child Individual Differences 
(ICID; Halverson et al., 2003; Tackett et al., 
2012) Second, Big Five structure has been 
obtained in questionnaires not designed 
specifically to measure the Big Five but in -
stead created simply to tap a wide range of 
childhood traits; the best known measure of 
this type is the common-  language California 
Child Q-Set (CCQ; Caspi et al., 1992; John, 
Caspi, Robins, Moffitt, & Stouthamer- 
Loeber, 1994; Soto & John, 2014). In addi -
tion, other Big Five questionnaire measures 
have been used successfully in childhood, 
for example the BFI-2, which was originally 
created for use in adults.
There is emerging evidence that the Big 
Five is not adequate to capture the structure 
of personality traits in childhood; rather a 
Big Five model plus an additional sixth trait 
of Activity better describes the structure of 
traits in children and adolescents (reviewed 
in De Pauw, 2017; Shiner & DeYoung, 2013; 
Soto & Tackett, 2015); this model has been 
dubbed the “Little Six” (Soto, 2016; Soto & 
John, 2014). The Little Six model appears to 
be especially stable beginning around age 6, 
the beginning of middle childhood (Soto & 
John, 2014).
Although the content of the Big Five traits 
overlaps considerably with the adult Big 
Five, there are some significant differences 
in each of the traits, as seen in work on the 
HiPIC, the ICID, the CCQ, and research ex -
amining the joint structure of the Big Five 
and temperament (De Pauw et al., 2009). In 
the following, I highlight some of the devel -
opmental differences in the makeup of each 
trait.
Extraversion  in childhood includes ten -
dencies toward positive emotions, sociabil -
ity, and expressiveness. It is interesting to 
note that the CCQ measure of Extraversion 
includes expressiveness of both positive and 
negative emotions and experiences (Soto 
& John, 2014); extraverted children seem 
prone to share all  aspects of their experienc -
es with others, not just their positive ones. 
It is notable that most childhood Big Five 
measures do not include positive expres -
sions of assertiveness and social dominance 
as a facet of extraversion; rather, as I note 