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Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a psychologist best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the living psychologist most frequently cited in science journals.
Hans Eysenck was born in Germany, but moved to England as a young man in the 1930s because of his opposition to the Nazi party. Eysenck was the founding editor of the journal 'Personality and Individual Differences' and authored over 50 books and over 900 academic articles. He aroused intense debate with his controversial dealing with variation in IQ among racial groups.
Eysenck was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) from 1955 to 1983. He was a major contributor to the modern scientific theory of personality and a brilliant teacher who also played a crucial role in the establishment of behavioural treatments for mental disorders.
However, Eysenck's work was often controversial. Publications in which Eysenck's views have roused controversy include (chronologically):
Eysenck also earned criticism for accepting funding from the Pioneer Fund, a eugenics organization that has been controversial.
By far the most acrimonious of the debates has been that over the role of genetics in IQ differences, which led to Eysenck famously being punched on the nose during a talk at the London School of Economics.
Eysenck's attitude is summarised in his autobiography 'Rebel with a Cause' (Transaction Publishers (1997), "I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.
Eysenck was one of the first psychologists to study personality with the method of factor analysis, a statistical technique introduced by Charles Spearman. Eysenck's results suggested two main personality factors. The first factor was the tendency to experience negative emotions, and Eysenck referred to it as Neuroticism. The second factor was the tendency to enjoy positive events, especially social events, and Eysenck named it Extraversion. The two personality dimensions were described in his 1947 book Dimensions of Personality. It is common practice in personality psychology to refer to the dimensions by the first letters, E and N.
E and N provided a 2-dimensional space to describe individual differences in behaviour. An analogy can be made to how latitude and longitude describe a point on the face of the earth. Also, Eysenck noted how these two dimensions were similar to four personality types first proposed by the Greek physician Hippocrates:
The third dimension, psychoticism, was added to the model in the late 1970s, based upon collaborations between Eysenck and his wife, Sybil B. G. Eysenck, who is the current editor of Personality and Individual Differences.
The major strength of Eysenck's model was to provide detailed theory of the causes of personality. For example, Eysenck proposed that extraversion was caused by variability in cortical arousal: "introverts are characterized by higher levels of activity than extraverts and so are chronically more cortically aroused than extraverts"
The major alternative to Eysenck's three factor model of personality is a model that makes use of five broad traits, often called the Big Five model. The traits in the Big Five are as follows:
Extraversion and Neuroticism in the Big Five are similar to Eysenck's traits of the same name. However, what Eysenck calls the trait of Psychoticism corresponds to two traits in the Big Five model: Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. Eysenck's personality system did not address Openness to experience. He argued that his approach was a better description of personality.
More information on the Big Five
A large body of research suggests that risk takers tend to be higher in the "Sensation Seeking" trait, a small element of the broader Psychoticism vs. Humaneness trait.
Marvin Zuckerman initially developed the theory of Sensation Seeking in the 1950s following a series of sensory deprivation experiments. He began to suspect that the people who volunteered for these experiments might share a similar set of personality characteristics. These individuals appeared to be especially venturesome and inquisitive, eager to have new and exciting experiences even if they did contain a degree of social or physical risk.
A large number of studies have shown that people who engage in a range of high risk behaviours tend to be high Sensation Seekers, which quickly leads to the hypothesis that people take risks in order to have exciting, novel and intense new experiences. Studies involving identical twins that are reared apart suggest that a large proportion of Sensation Seeking is genetically determined (approximately 60%), and exciting new studies have begun to identify the specific genes that regulate this need. On average men tend to be higher in Sensation Seeking than women, and Sensation Seeking also tends to decline with age. This goes some way to explain why many people who take potentially fatal risks are young men.
However it should be remembered that many women are high Sensation Seekers, and an increasing number of women participate in high risk sports and take health risks such as smoking and binge drinking.
Type A personality, also known as the Type A Behavior Pattern, is a set of characteristics that includes being impatient, excessively time-conscious, insecure about one's status, highly competitive, hostile and aggressive, and incapable of relaxation.
Type A individuals are often high-achieving workaholics who multi-task, drive themselves with deadlines, and are unhappy about the smallest of delays. Although they may exhibit some or all of these characteristics, it does not mean that people with the type A personality are incapable of showing love, affection or other types of non-pessimistic behavior. Many are also capable of "coaching" some of these behavior attributes with proper treatment and medication. Those who do not seek treatment have been described as stress junkies, and often display some of the following characteristics:
The Type B personality, in contrast, is patient, relaxed, and easy-going. There is also a Type AB or Type X mixed profile for people who cannot be clearly categorized and have a combination of both types of personality.
