Temperament Test by H.J. Eysenck

Does every person really have a set of qualities that determine their behavior, reaction speed, and persistence in any situation? Ancient Roman doctors believed that nervous activity is formed under the influence of the ratio of the main fluids in the human body: blood, lymph, yellow and black bile. In their opinion, each of the fluids influenced certain emotional manifestations, and their entire set was called “temperament.”

When the German-British psychologist Hans Jurgen Eysenck observed military personnel during World War II, he came to the conclusion that the behavior of each person is indeed determined by a certain set of stable personality traits. Eysenck believed that these traits are mostly genetically determined, but to some extent they are also formed under the influence of the environment. Gradually working with different sets of factors, Eysenck settled on two scales: extraversion and neuroticism.

The extroversion scale made it possible to understand where a person’s emotional energy is directed. Low values ​​indicated introversion (focused on oneself),high values ​​indicated extroversion (focused on the outside world). The neuroticism scale allowed us to determine how emotionally stable a person is and measure mental excitability to stimuli. It also has two poles: emotional stability and emotional instability.

Thanks to the extraversion and neuroticism scales, any person's result falls into one of four quadrants: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic.

Extroverts (sanguine and choleric) are sociable, but have low persistence. They often take the initiative, have flexible behavior and high social adaptability.

Introverts (phlegmatic and melancholic) are observant, detached, socially uncommunicative and have sufficient persistence. They are prone to introspection, they find it difficult to adapt to a new society and they tend to focus on their feelings.