The four temperaments: a historical idea, not a scientific one

Where the model comes from

The idea comes from Greek medicine. Texts attributed to Hippocrates (around the 5th century BCE) explained health as a balance of four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. In the 2nd century the physician Galen linked the dominance of each humor to a temperament: sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile) and phlegmatic (phlegm).

Humoral theory ruled Western medicine for more than a thousand years and was dropped as modern physiology advanced. The names, however, survived in language and philosophy. Kant and later Wundt reorganized the four temperaments along two dimensions: the strength and the speed of emotional reactions (Stelmack & Stalikas, 1991).

What the research says

The original biology is wrong: there are no bodily humors that determine character. What modern psychology kept was the intuition that people differ stably in emotional reactivity and sociability. Hans Eysenck noted that the four temperaments fit the quadrants formed by two dimensions he measured, extraversion and neuroticism. Sanguine would be the stable extravert; choleric, the unstable extravert; melancholic, the unstable introvert; and phlegmatic, the stable introvert (Eysenck, 1967).

Contemporary temperament research is a different thing. Studies of infants and children, such as those by Thomas and Chess (1977), Mary Rothbart and Jerome Kagan (1994), describe biologically based dimensions, like inhibition toward novelty, activity level and self-regulation, that appear early and relate to adult personality. Those models are dimensional and don't support four types.

Why it is still used

The four temperaments are easy to remember and offer simple language for talking about pace, energy and emotional reaction. That's how Ethea uses them: as a light entry point tied to a historical tradition, not as a scientific measure.

Limitations

There is no modern empirical validation for a four-temperament test as distinct types. Broad descriptions tend to feel accurate to almost everyone (the Forer effect: Forer, 1949), so the feeling that it "got you right" is not evidence of validity. Ethea's test uses forced choice, which yields a relative ranking among the four and can't say whether you are more or less "choleric" than someone else.

How Ethea adapts the model

Ethea's test has 20 rows of four words, one per temperament; you pick the one most like you. The result shows your main and secondary temperament, and the texts connect them to the modern dimensions of extraversion and emotional stability. If you want a measure with scientific backing, we recommend the Big Five test.

Test created by Giovanni Oliveira.

References

Links with a DOI go to the original article. Where no DOI is given, the link opens a Google Scholar search.

1. Stelmack, R. M., & Stalikas, A. (1991). Galen and the humour theory of temperament. Personality and Individual Differences, 12(3), 255–263. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
2. Eysenck, H. J. (1967). The Biological Basis of Personality. Charles C. Thomas. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
3. Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and Development. Brunner/Mazel. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
4. Kagan, J. (1994). Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature. Basic Books. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
5. Rothbart, M. K. (2007). Temperament, development, and personality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(4), 207–212. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
6. Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
7. Hicks, L. E. (1970). Some properties of ipsative, normative, and forced-choice normative measures. Psychological Bulletin, 74(3), 167–184. DOI: 10.1037/h0029780(opens in a new tab)
8. Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2011). Item response modeling of forced-choice questionnaires. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(3), 460–502. DOI: 10.1177/0013164410375112(opens in a new tab)
9. Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2013). How IRT can solve problems of ipsative data in forced-choice questionnaires. Psychological Methods, 18(1), 36–52. DOI: 10.1037/a0030641(opens in a new tab)