Hi guys! Today you will get to know what kind of person you are. This quiz will help you resolve if you are a sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. Answer twenty questions and find out now!
The four temperament theory is a proto-psychological theory that suggests that there are four fundamental personality types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. Most formulations include the possibility of mixtures among the types where an individual’s personality types overlap and they share two or more temperaments. Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460 – c. 370 BC) described the four temperaments as part of the ancient medical concept of humourism, that four bodily fluids affect human personality traits and behaviors. Modern medical science does not define a fixed relationship between internal secretions and personality, although some psychological personality type systems use categories similar to the Greek temperaments.
Temperament theory has its roots in the ancient theory of humourism. It may have originated in Mesopotamia, but it was Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) (and later Galen) who developed it into a medical theory. He believed that certain human moods, emotions, and behaviors were caused by an excess or lack of body fluids (called “humours”), which he classified as blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.[3] Each of which was responsible for different patterns in personalities, as well as how susceptible you were to get a disease. Galen (AD 129 – c. 200) developed the first typology of temperament in his dissertation De temperamentis and searched for physiological reasons for different behaviors in humans. He classified them as hot/cold and dry/wet taken from the four elements. There could also be a balance between the qualities, yielding a total of nine temperaments. The word “temperament” itself comes from Latin “temperare”, “to mix”. In the ideal personality, the complementary characteristics were exquisitely balanced among warm-cool and dry-moist. In four less-ideal types, one of the four qualities was dominant over all the others. In the remaining four types, one pair of qualities dominated the complementary pair; for example, warm and moist dominated cool and dry. These last four were the temperamental categories which Galen named “sanguine”, “choleric”, “melancholic”, and “phlegmatic” after the bodily humours. Each was the result of an excess of one of the humours which produced the imbalance in paired qualities.
The properties of these humours also corresponded to the four seasons. Thus blood, which was considered hot and wet, corresponded to spring. Yellow bile, considered hot and dry, corresponded to summer. Black bile, cold and dry, corresponded to autumn. And finally, phlegm, cold and wet, corresponded to winter.
These properties were considered the basis of health and disease. This meant that having a balance and good mixture of the humours defined good health, while an imbalance or separation of the humours led to disease. Because the humours corresponded to certain seasons, one way to avoid an imbalance or disease was to change health-related habits depending on the season. Some physicians did this by regulating a patient’s diet, while some used remedies such as phlebotomy and purges to get rid of excess blood. Even Galen proposed a theory of the importance of proper digestion in forming healthy blood. The idea was that the two most important factors when digesting are the types of food and the person’s body temperature. This meant that if too much heat were involved, then the blood would become “overcooked.” This meant that it would contain too much yellow bile, and the patient would become feverish. If there were not enough heat involved, this would cause there to be too much phlegm.
Persian polymath Avicenna (980–1037 AD) extended the theory of temperaments in his Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. He applied them to “emotional aspects, mental capacity, moral attitudes, self-awareness, movements and dreams.” Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654) suggested that the humors acted as governing principles in bodily health, with astrological correspondences, and explained their influence upon physiognomy and personality. He proposed that some people had a single temperament, while others had an admixture of two, a primary and secondary temperament.
In the field of physiology. Studies by physiologist Ivan Pavlov on the types and properties of the nervous system, where three main properties were identified: (1) strength, (2) mobility of nervous processes, and (3) balance between excitation and inhibition and derived four types based on these three properties.
Other researchers developed similar systems, many of which did not use the ancient temperament names and several paired extraversion with a different factor that would determine the relationship and task orientation. Examples are DiSC assessment and social styles. One of the most popular today is the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, whose four temperaments were based largely on the Greek gods: Apollo, Dionysus, Epimetheus, and Prometheus, and were mapped to the 16 types of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). They were renamed Artisan (SP), Guardian (SJ), Idealist (NF), and Rational (NT).
What is your temperament? Are you a sanguine, choleric, or maybe a melancholic or phlegmatic? Answer twenty questions in this quiz and find out now!
