BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES - Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie

Choleric - short response time-delay, but response sustained for a
relatively long time. (hot/dry)
Melancholic - long response time-delay, response sustained at
length, if not, seemingly, permanently. (cold/dry)
From this schema it is evident that the sanguine and choleric
shared a common trait: quickness of response, while the melancholy and
phlegmatic shared the opposite, a longer response. The melancholy and
choleric, however, shared a sustained response, and the sanguine and
phlegmatic shared a short-lived response. That meant, that the Choleric
and melancholy both would tend to hang on to emotions like anger, and
thus appear more serious and critical than the fun-loving sanguine, and the
peaceful phlegmatic. However, the choleric would be characterized by
quick expressions of anger, while the melancholy would build up anger
slowly, silently, before exploding.
The medical theory of temperament began to lose favor in the
early modern period. As a characterization of a person's psychological
state, however, temperament continued to be employed by both
psychologists and the lay public well into the twentieth century. The
temperamental theories as well as tests were developed in contemporary
periods by David Keirsey, Myers-Briggs, Ernst Kretschmer etc.
2.3. Behavior and Human Somatic
One very famous though discussable personality type conception
belong to William Sheldon (1898-1977). He was an American
psychologist who devoted his life to observing the variety of human
bodies and temperaments. He taught and did research at a number of U.S.
universities and is best known for his series of books on the human
constitution. For his study of the human physique, Dr. Sheldon started
with 4,000 photographs of college-age men, which showed front, back and
side views. By carefully examining these photos he discovered that there
were three fundamental elements which, when combined together, made
up all these physiques or somatotypes. With great effort and ingenuity he
worked out ways to measure these three components and to express them
numerically so that every human body could be described in terms of three
numbers, and that two independent observers could arrive at very similar
results in determining a person's body type.
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