Hypothetically (and not pleasant to think about), could a person's temperament be affected through violence. Could I take a calm temperament and shift it through harsh conditioning?
It depends on what temperament means. But I'm sure you can make a previously calm person a jumpy nervous wreck by exposing them to the right circumstances. It happens to soldiers and civilians in wars all the time.
Why I ask is if it could go one way, could it go another? Could a violent temperament potentially shift toward calm? Now, it could of course be argued that it is only 'behavioural' again but it would be impossible to tell, at least from the outside and potentially from the inside too. I am nt sure if I explained that well but I reckon you will understand enough.blockquote>
It it routinely done in psychiatric hospitals nowadays.
But if you define temperament as genetic predisposition active in crucial developmental stages, then a change of temperament is obviously impossible because by that predisposition is a historical fact: the development of temperament may have had an epigenetic component. (Epigenetics is the study of the effects of changes in gene expression rather than the genetic code itself.)