THE BIG FIVE 1
THE BIG FIVE
Name
PSY 330: Theories of Personality
Instructor:
Date
, THE BIG FIVE 2
Trait theory started in ancient Greece with Hippocrates and Galen, who used
Hippocrates’s four “humors” (or fluids) and applied them four different personality traits. As
wrong as the Greeks may have gotten trait theory as it was based on the four humors of the
body (we now know that having excess bile does not affect a person’s mood or personality) we
still use the terms of their classifications in our daily language such as “melancholic” still
means to feel sad or “choleric” for a person who is irritable. We now no longer associate
personality with having excess bile or blood as Hippocrates and Galen thought but we still link
biology and psychiatry together. With what we are now learning about the mind/body
connection the ancient Greeks may still have been more on the right track than western
medicine and psychology think today.
Regardless of the validity or lack of validity of their work, this work still started the field
of trait theory while setting the stage for all later work that continues to this day. It would seem
that personality traits would not have much relation to a biological process. We “now recognize
the neurobiological foundation of personality, and this perspective is fundamental to personality
theory” (Lecci, 2015) However, “Eysenck believed that basic biological/genetic mechanisms
underlie all human traits” which is what makes personality traits stable over time. He used two
sets of polar opposites to create a 3-dimensional representation of his trait model. On one end of
the circular model is emotionally unstable on one pole verses emotionally stable on the opposite
side, and on the other axis is introverted with extroverted om the opposite side. The four humors
are then divided so that melancholic and choleric are on the emotionally unstable side, and
THE BIG FIVE
Name
PSY 330: Theories of Personality
Instructor:
Date
, THE BIG FIVE 2
Trait theory started in ancient Greece with Hippocrates and Galen, who used
Hippocrates’s four “humors” (or fluids) and applied them four different personality traits. As
wrong as the Greeks may have gotten trait theory as it was based on the four humors of the
body (we now know that having excess bile does not affect a person’s mood or personality) we
still use the terms of their classifications in our daily language such as “melancholic” still
means to feel sad or “choleric” for a person who is irritable. We now no longer associate
personality with having excess bile or blood as Hippocrates and Galen thought but we still link
biology and psychiatry together. With what we are now learning about the mind/body
connection the ancient Greeks may still have been more on the right track than western
medicine and psychology think today.
Regardless of the validity or lack of validity of their work, this work still started the field
of trait theory while setting the stage for all later work that continues to this day. It would seem
that personality traits would not have much relation to a biological process. We “now recognize
the neurobiological foundation of personality, and this perspective is fundamental to personality
theory” (Lecci, 2015) However, “Eysenck believed that basic biological/genetic mechanisms
underlie all human traits” which is what makes personality traits stable over time. He used two
sets of polar opposites to create a 3-dimensional representation of his trait model. On one end of
the circular model is emotionally unstable on one pole verses emotionally stable on the opposite
side, and on the other axis is introverted with extroverted om the opposite side. The four humors
are then divided so that melancholic and choleric are on the emotionally unstable side, and
