Jan Strelau facts for kids

Jan Strelau (born 30 May 1931 in Gdańsk; died 4 August 2020 in Warsaw) was a Polish psychologist. He was famous for his studies on temperament, which is about how people naturally react and behave.

He was a professor of psychology at Warsaw University from 1968 to 2001. After that, he became a professor at Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. There, he held important leadership roles, including Vice-rector for Research and International Affairs.

Exploring Temperament and Behavior

Jan Strelau spent many years studying temperament. He wanted to understand how our natural way of reacting helps us deal with different situations, especially tough ones like stress. He also looked at how temperament might affect behavior problems.

Strelau took ideas from a famous scientist named Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov studied how the nervous system works, looking at things like how strong or quick our brain reactions are. Strelau turned these ideas into psychological traits that could be measured.

• Measuring Temperament:
  • Since the 1970s, he used the Strelau Temperament Inventory (STI).
  • From 1999, he used the Pavlovian Temperament Survey (PTS). He created this with other researchers.
  • Both of these tools have been translated into many languages and are used worldwide.

Strelau was also a pioneer in Poland for studying how genes influence behavior. This field is called behavior genetics. Later, his students continued this work, looking at specific genes that might be linked to temperament traits.

Leading Psychology Research

Jan Strelau founded and led important research centers at Warsaw University. These included the Department of Psychology of Individual Differences and the Interdisciplinary Center for Behavior-Genetic Research.

He was also a leader in the international psychology community:

• He was the first president of the European Association of Personality Psychology.
• He served as president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.
• He was also the Vice-president of the International Union of Psychological Science.

Strelau was born in the Free City of Danzig, which is now Gdańsk. He was a member of important scientific groups like the Polish Academy of Sciences. He also received special honorary degrees from several universities. In 2000, he won the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science, often called the "Polish Nobel Prize." In 2011, he received a high state award, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.

He passed away in Warsaw at the age of 89.

Strelau's Theory of Temperament

Jan Strelau developed his own important idea called the Regulative Theory of Temperament (RTT). This theory focuses on the "formal aspects" of behavior. This means it looks at the energy and timing of how we act.

The RTT describes several temperament traits:

• Energetic Aspects:
  • Sensory sensitivity: How much you react to things like sounds, sights, or touch.
  • Emotional reactivity: How strongly you feel emotions.
  • Endurance: How long you can keep going with a task.
  • Activity: How much you tend to do or move.
• Temporal Aspects:
  • Briskness: How quickly you react or start doing something.
  • Perseverance: How long you stick with a task, even if it's difficult.

To measure these traits, Strelau and Bogdan Zawadzki created the Formal Characteristics of Behavior – Temperament Inventory (FCB-TI). This tool has also been adapted into many languages.

Strelau and his team found that about 40 percent of these temperament traits are inherited from our parents. Their research also showed that traits like emotional reactivity, perseverance, and activity can really affect how people deal with very difficult experiences, such as trauma from disasters. For example, they studied victims of catastrophes and found that certain temperament traits influenced whether people developed problems like PTSD.

Jan Strelau wrote about 250 scientific articles on the psychology of individual differences. He also wrote or edited 44 books.