Hans Eysenck (1916 - 1997)
Hans Eysenck was born in Germany on March 4, 1916. His parents
were actors who divorced when
he was only two, which resulted in Hans being raised by his grandmother. He left
for England when he was 18 years old at the time when the Nazis came to power. He taught at the University of London, as well as serving
as the director of the psychology department of the Institute of Psychiatry,
associated with Bethlehem Royal Hospital. He is one of the most prolific writers in psychology, having authored some 75 books and
700 articles.
Theory
Eysenck was a behaviorist with an interest in temperament. He employed a statistical technique known as factor analysis for the purpose of extracting small sets of dimensions from large masses of data. This data was often in the form of rating yourself on a scale for various adjectives. This data, once factor analysis was applied, would produce a small set of dimensions which would supposedly characterize (or summarize) your temperament.
One of Eysenck's major contributions was his finding of two main dimensions of temperament: neuroticism and extraversion-introversion. Here, neuroticism refers to a person's nervousness and their frequency of nervous disorders, whereas extraversion-introversion refers to the dominating emphasis of a person's attention and whether it was directed towards the outside world and to other people (i.e., extraversion) or to their inner self (introversion). Moreover, Eysenck found that extraverts tend to be more outgoing than their shyer counterpart introverts.
Later theorists have assigned many more dimensions for temperament than what Eysenck originally suggested, ranging from 5 to 35.
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