STATEMENT 1 / 160 of 16 answered
How much do you agree?
"I enjoy being the centre of attention at gatherings."
What the four temperaments are, in short
The four temperaments, sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic, are an ancient way of sorting personality. Today they're best understood as the four corners of two traits: how outgoing you are (extraversion) and how easily you're upset (emotional stability).
The original theory said each type came from an excess of one bodily fluid, or humour. Medicine dropped that idea in the 1800s. The descriptions lasted because they match two dimensions that modern research still finds in every major personality model. This test uses our own statements.
By What's Your IQ · Reviewed 4 Oct 2026- Format
- 16 statements, 8 per dimension, rated 1–5
- Dimensions
- Introversion–extraversion, stability–instability
- Origin
- Hippocrates (c. 400 BC) and Galen (2nd century AD)
- Modern form
- Hans Eysenck's two-factor model (1940s–60s)
THE ORIGINAL THEORY
Four fluids, four seasons, four elements
Greek and Roman medicine tied everything together in fours. Pick a humour to see what it was linked to, and what replaced it.
HUMOURBloodToo much blood was thought to make people warm, lively and fond of pleasure.Gives the temperament: Sanguine
2 traitsare enough to rebuild all four typesEysenck showed the old descriptions fall into place on extraversion and neuroticism, two traits that reappear in the Big Five and other modern models.3
c. 400 BCFour humours. Writings attributed to Hippocrates explained health as a balance of blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm.1
2nd centuryFour temperaments. Galen linked each humour to a character type, a theory that shaped Western medicine for 1,500 years.2
1903From boxes to axes. Wilhelm Wundt suggested the four types were really combinations of two underlying dimensions of emotional response.3
1960sMeasured. Hans Eysenck built questionnaires for extraversion and neuroticism and drew the map in the panel above, placing Galen's four types in its quadrants.3
- Hippocratic Corpus. On the Nature of Man (c. 400 BC).
- Kagan, J. (1994). Galen's prophecy: Temperament in human nature. Basic Books.
- Eysenck, H. J. (1967). The biological basis of personality. Charles C. Thomas.