Eysenck and the personality

The first is one of the earliest studies in a long line of research by Hans
Eysenck. Eysenck was influenced by Greek philosophy in his search for human
personality. The Greeks thought there were four categories of person:
the melancholic , the sanguine, the choleric and the phlegmatic. Eysenck, instead
of thinking people could be pigeon-holed this neatly suggested people could be
described on a sliding scale of each of these factors. He had a hunch that
personality differences between people could be described on two
‘dimensions’. “Extraversion is the degree to which a person is outgoing and
neuroticism is the degree to which they are emotionally stable (or not).”These
dimensions were introversion versus extraversion and neuroticism versus
stability. Extraversion is the degree to which a person is outgoing and
neuroticism is the degree to which they are emotionally stable (or not).

If you imagine these two dimensions at right angles to each other then you have
a big cross with four quadrants on which everyone’s personality falls
somewhere. For example, if you are highly introverted and highly neurotic, you
are an extremely anxious person. On the other hand if you are highly neurotic
but extraverted then you would be an hysteric (Hampson, 1988).

Eysenck (1944) tested this theory by using information from 700 patients at a

military hospital. He asked their treating psychiatrists to rate patients on a
number of scales which included ‘degraded work history’, ‘sex anomalies’ and
‘dependent’ along with a host of others. From these he used a technique called
factor analysis from which these two dimensions of introversion/extraversion
and neuroticism/stability emerged.

“Eysenck made an exciting, bold statement…”When you think about it, Eysenck
made an exciting, bold statement: every human’s personality can be classified
on just two sliding scales. Since then personality theory has moved on and now
theorists have settled on five sliding scales. This scale is going strong and
appears to describe some of the systematic ways in which people differ. Well it
would do, if there wasn’t one rather large fly in the personality psychologist’s
ointment: the situation.