[Author Affiliation]John N. Constantino. William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri.ISBN: 978-0-393-70730-4. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 288 pages.Address correspondence to: John N. Constantino, MD, William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, 660 S. Euclid Ave. Campus Box 8134, St. Louis, MO 63110, E-mail: constantino@wustl.eduTemperament is a very messy topic. Suppose we reduce human behavior to a simple automotive model, which the accelerator drives the initiation of a behavior, the fuel line maintains behavior once it starts, and brakes stop behavior. Temperament refers to individuals' to differentially implement these functions under a given set of external conditions. It is difficult enough with cars, but for humans, rather than having a system whereby we specify how quickly an individual applies the brake on a wet surface when viewing a stopped vehicle 50 meters ahead, we typically operationalize temperament by asking a question such as does this person tend to be overly cautious? Sometimes this serves as a reasonable proxy for temperament, other times not. In this book, Rettew breaks it all down and derives a sensible and practical working model for this elusive but critical sphere of influence on human behavior.The book begins with a history of scientific attempts to characterize innate stimulus-response characteristics of human beings, and how a diverse set of investigative approaches - sometimes implementing highly imperfect questions, sometimes tracing the continuity of temperament traits over time, sometimes distilling new insights by tracking which tendencies travel together when more than one is measured, sometimes implementing genetically or biologically invormative designs that allow differentiation of nature and nurture - has converged upon a small number of primary dimensions of temperament that represent a sensible point of departure for modern behavioral neuroscience, clinical care, and, refreshingly, even parenting. The Rettew concludes, are negative emotionality, a child's proneness to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, sadness, or anger; extraversion, a child's tendency to engage the world and people around him/her; and regulatory ability, the capacity to regulate emotion and attention and to rein in overreaction when it would otherwise result maladaptive responses to changes the environment. The book proceeds to describe advances understanding of the relationship between temperament and psychopathology, how extremes (high or low) the big three confer susceptibilities to psychiatric disorders, especially when other genetic or environmental risk factors for those conditions are at play. Moderation each of the big three can be key to successful interpersonal adaptation, and Rettew astutely proposes the conceptualizatio: that when asked to describe a temperamental ideal, the word typically enters our parlance: ... we want someone who can be spontaneous yet responsible, sensitive yet assertive, a good talker yet a good listener.The entire second half of the book is devoted to practical applications, and most notably summarizes these a series of extremely informative tables. A first outlines how characterization of a pediatric patient's temperament can inform recommendations to that patient's village (family members, friends, and educators) about how to adopt supportive approaches that match that child's temperamental tendencies a way that he predicts will yield the best results from those supports. …