Four Temperaments

Four temperaments
[pic]
4 humours in respective order: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic.
Four temperaments is a theory of proto-psychology that stems from the ancient medical concept of humorism and suggests that four bodily fluids affect human personality traits and behaviors. The temperaments are sanguine (pleasure-seeking and sociable), choleric (ambitious and leader-like),melancholic (introverted and thoughtful), and phlegmatic (relaxed and quiet).
The Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) incorporated the four temperaments into his medical theories. From then through modern times, they, or modifications of them, have been part of many theories of medicine and psychology, and literature.

History and development

Temperament theory has its roots in one ofthe ancient four humors theory. It may have origins in ancient Egypt[1] or Mesopotamia,[2] but it was the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) who developed it into a medical theory. He believed certain human moods, emotions and behaviors were caused by body fluids (called "humors"): blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Next, Galen (AD 131–200) developed the first typology of temperamentin his dissertation De temperamentis, and searched for physiological reasons for different behaviors in humans. He mapped them to a matrix of hot/cold and dry/wet taken from the Four Elements.[3] There could also be "balance" between the qualities, yielding a total of nine temperaments. The word "temperament" itself comes from Latin "temperare", "to mix". In the ideal personality, thecomplementary characteristics or warm-cool and dry-moist were exquisitely balanced. In four less ideal types, one of the four qualities was dominant over all the others. In the remaining four types, one pair of qualities dominated the complementary pair; for example; warm and moist dominated cool and dry. These latter four were the temperamental categories Galen named "sanguine", "choleric", "melancholic" and"phlegmatic" after the bodily humors, respectively. Each was the result of an excess of one of the humors that produced, in turn, the imbalance in paired qualities.[4][5][6]
In his Canon of Medicine, Avicenna (980–1037 AD) then extended the theory of temperaments to encompass "emotional aspects, mental capacity, moral attitudes, self-awareness, movements and dreams."[7]
Nicholas Culpeper(1616–1654) made great use of humours as a philosophical concept which found expression in astrological correspondences. He published a discourse on how they acted as governing principles in bodily health in his English Physician and Family Dispenstory[8] and explained their influence upon physiognomy and personality in his Semeiotica Urania.[9] Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925),Alfred Adler (1879–1937), Erich Adickes (1866–1925), Eduard Spranger (1914), Ernst Kretschmer (1920), and Erich Fromm (1947) all theorized on the four temperaments (with different names) and greatly shaped our modern theories of temperament. Hans Eysenck (1916–1997) was one of the first psychologists to analyze personality differences using a psycho-statistical method (factor analysis), and hisresearch led him to believe that temperament is biologically based. The factors he proposed in his book Dimensions of Personality were Neuroticism (N) which was the tendency to experience negative emotions, and the second was Extraversion (E) which was the tendency to enjoy positive events, especially social ones. By pairing the two dimensions, Eysenck noted how the results were similar to the fourancient temperaments.
Other researchers developed similar systems, many of which did not use the ancient temperament names, and several paired extroversion with a different factor, which would determine relationship/task-orientation. Examples are DiSC assessment, social styles, and a theory that adds a fifth temperament. One of the most popular today is the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, whose four...