The suggestion that people appear in roughly 4 personality shapes has been around for 2400 years. It's fascinating that today, after a century of intense research, we are left with about the same frame for understanding behavior. During Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the names given were choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. A whole culture developed around these four temperaments during the Middle Ages, depicting them in the arts directly or symbolically. They strongly influenced medicine and medieval cuisine.
And they were a starting point for early modern psychological research.
Here is my current understanding of the subject:
Here is my current understanding of the subject:
Let's look at some other models:
Merrill and Reid's social styles:
Marston's DISC:
Jung's functions:
Lothian's integration of Jung's additional functions of sensation and intuition (insightsdiscovery.com):
Lothian's representation of Myers and Briggs' 16 types:
Thayer's approach from a physiological angle:
which brings us to Eysenck's proposal:
And here is how I see Gray's biological model fit in:
for example, the BIS activation threshold is lower for melancholics than for the other three temperaments, in other words their BIS kicks in sooner than in people of the other temperaments. Phlegmatics' systems activate later than in any of the other three temperaments:
Cloninger's temperament and character dimensions; I am aware that the character and temperament dimensions are not identical in Cloninger's view; I see how they could be identified though:
Would "SELF-AWARE" fit in the Sanguine's quadrant?I am not sure how to place the five factors of the Five Factor Model in relation to each other on a circle, so here is my attempt:
The place of each factor means that related traits are displayed more frequently by people sharing that section of the temperamental circle.Benis' NPA model is easy to fit in:
Hamilton at wealthdynamics.com possibly based his model of pursuit of personal economic development on ideas from Jung (thinking/feeling) and Lothian (location of sensing/intuition). I suppose introversion here means thinking (task orientation) vs. extraversion meaning feeling (people orientation):
I modified Hamilton's wealth creation model (see wealthdynamics.com) as follows:
I imagined what this looked like 700 years ago:
And finally a look at the chessboard. Rooks represent the task/thinking orientation; they go only in right angles. Bishops take the oblique angle on things with their people/feeling orientation. Knights do both with intuitive leaps, but not at same length. Queens do both at same length but without leaps. Kings do everything, but never go as far as the previous four. Pawns represent the 8 personality types suggested by Lothian:
