Introduction
Aelius Galenus (129–200/216 AD), commonly referred as Galen of Pergamon or simply as Galen, was a Greek physician and philosopher in the Roman Empire. Earlier, Hippocrates (460–370 BC) had proposed that there were four bodily humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), and imbalances in these humors result in human moods. Galen associated each of these four humors with a personality type: sanguine (blood), phlegmatic (phlegm), choleric (yellow bile), and melancholic (black bile).
Modern psychologists have rejected the connection between the four temperaments and the bodily humors, but they have accepted that people may be characterized by the four temperaments proposed by Galen. They have also sought to understand them in modern terms. For example, Wundt (1903) used the two dimensions of changeability/unchangeability and emotional/unemotional to produce the four types:
Choleric |
Changeable and emotional |
Melancholic |
Unchangeable and emotional |
Sanguine |
Changeable and... |
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Lester, D. (2019). A Four-Factor Theory of Personality. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2347-1
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