Theories of personality eysenck PDF

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Hans Jürgen Eysenck is a German psychologist who was born in Berlin on March 4, 1916. Eysenck’s mother Helga Molander was a film star and his father Eduard Anton Eysenck was an entertainer in a nightclub. His maternal grandmother raised Eysenck. According to Theories of Personality by Richard M. Ryckman, Eysenck’s father was Catholic and his mother Protestant. Although he was christened and confirmed in the Lutheran faith, Eysenck was not particularly religious. When Hans was young, he was known to be somewhat a wild child. Hans in one incident almost lost his right eye because he and his friends were shooting paper arrows at each other from rubber bands. Because of this incident, when Hens got older he lost eyesight in his right eye. Eysenck also was a “very good athlete.” He played sports like soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, rowing, and tennis. Eysenck had moved to England in the 1930s after his grandmother had been killed in the concentration camp. He once expressed his opposition to the Nazi party; “My hatred of Hitler and the Nazis, and all they stood for, was so overwhelming that no argument could counter it.” Eysenck was 18 years old when he left Germany. Eysenck eventually went to school and earned his Ph.D in Psychology from the University College London in 1940. Hens was under the supervision of Professor Sir Cyril Burt. Sir Burt was “best-known for his research on the heritability of intelligence.” Eysenck also studied genetics with J.B.S Haldane (a british-indian scientist known for his works in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics). Eysenck married a Canadian mathematician by the name of Margaret Davies. They later had a son named Michael, who is a well known psychologist. Later on, the couple got divorced and Eysenck married Sybil Rostal. Rostal was a psychologist and the daughter of a well-known violinist. The couple had a daughter and three sons.

When England was in war with Nazi Germany, Eysenck “tried to enlist in the Royal Air Force but he was turned down as an “enemy alien.”” Eysenck had a research position at Mill Hill Emergency Hospital. At Mills Hills Hospital he started studying suggestibility in hysterics. “He also worked on such topics as parotid gland secretion in affective mental disorders, screening tests for neurotics, memory tests, and the effects of motivation on intelligence.” From Eysenck’s research, he concluded the theory that there are “two major personality factors: neuroticism and extraversion/introversion.” Eysenck continued to work at Mill Hill Emergency Hospital until 1983. With the research that Eysenck was conducting, it led him to his first book known as Dimensions of Personality. “In his second book, The Scientific Study of Personality (1952), he added psychoticism as the third major dimension.” In the 1940s Eysenck started working at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London. Maudsley Hospital was respectfully known for having the best psychiatric hospital and teaching unit in England. Eysenck’s job was to make an initial assessment of each patient before their mental disorder was diagnosed by a psychiatrist (Theories of Personality textbook,9th edition). He asked multiple questions about behavior, which he later used on 700 soldiers who were being treated for neurotic disorders at the hospital. Eysenck traveled to the United States in 1949 to examine and evaluate clinical psychology programs in multiple universities. When Eysenck was in his trip to the United States he “came to three major conclusions about the shortcomings of clinical training and practice: first, clinical psychologists were subordinate to psychiatrists; second, many clinical psychologists slavishly utilized psychoanalytic concepts in their therapeutic work; third, clinicians depended too heavily on projective tests, even though they were unreliable and invalid.” Eysenck became a Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College

London from 1955 to 1983. Eysenck became one of the“contributors to the modern scientific theory of personality and a brilliant teacher who helped found treatment for mental illnesses.” Eventually as time passed Eysenck published 80 books and over 1,600 journal entries. Mr.Eysenck was known to be a “prolific writer.” Eysenck was the founding editor of the international journal Personality and Individual Differences. When Eysenck returned back to England he moved away from psychoanalysis and wanted to make a “program of study that was strongly scientific in orientation, with a focus on the interdependence of clinical and experimental work.” Because of Eysenck’s great work and accomplishments, his department became a huge success. His students and colleagues are conducting research in behavior therapy. On September 4, 1997 Hans Eysenck died of a brain tumor in a London hospice. He had been suffering for about a year before his passing. Eysenck’s last book was Intelligence: A New Look which was published in 1998 posthumously. Eysenck’s concepts and principles all started with his two concentrations: personality psychology and experimental psychology. He believed that theoreticians and researchers “in the two areas tend to ignore each other's’ work; experimental psychologists show little concern with individual differences and personality theorists ignore the need for empirical evidence. As a result of this mutual indifference, non scientific or prescientific theorists and practitioners abound in the field of personality. We are left with dozens of theories of personality, but very little in the way of factual support for them. Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality amongst individuals. According to Kendra Cherry, an author on psychology.about.com, Psychologists strive to understand how personality develops as well as how it influences the way we think and behave. This area of psychology seeks to understand

personality and how it varies among individuals as well as how people are similar in terms of personality. On the other hand, experimental psychology utilizes scientific methods to research the mind and behavior (Cherry). Eysenck believed that we must integrate the two approaches by: (1) identifying the main dimensions of personality; (2) devising means of measuring them; and (3) linking them with experimental, quantitative procedures. Only with this way, Eysenck believed, can we claim to be testing theories using a scientific perspective (Eysenck,1947/Theories of personality textbook). Eysenck’s theory of personality also focused on two dimensions of higher-order traits, extraversion vs introversion and emotional stability vs neuroticism (study.com). Extraverts are commonly known as being loud and outgoing while introverts are often thought of as quiet and reserved (study.com).According to Study.com, in psychology, the term arousal refers to any excitation. According to Eysenck, “introverts have a higher natural base level of excitation and therefore do not need to seek out stimulating environments. Extraverts have a lower base arousal and choose environments that provide more stimulation.” Neuroticism to Eysenck is the function of activity in the limbic system, and his research suggests that people who score highly on measures of neuroticism have a more reactive sympathetic nervous system and are more sensitive to environmental stimulation(Wikipedia). His views for Neurotics was that they were emotionally unstable individuals who had unreasonable fears of certain objects, places, persons, animals,open spaces, or heights (Eysenck,1965). According to Eysenck, stables are emotionally calm, unreactive, and unworried. Later on Eysenck added a third trait/dimension which was Psychoticism- lacking in empathy, cruel, a loner, aggressive and troublesome (simplypsychology.com). Eysenck was known to be a brilliant psychologist but also to be very controversial. He

said multiple times that psychoanalysis is “unscientific.” Eysenck’s biggest controversy was his view in heritability intelligence, more specifically his view that racial differences in intelligence could be partially attributed to genetic factors (Psychology.about.com). His theory was mostly about temperaments, and how he believed that it was genetically influenced. That is when Eysenck published his book called The IQ Argument: Race, Intelligence, and Education. Inhibition Theory was also a concept that Eysenck created. He created a psychometrically sound test to measure the major dimensions of personality. He wanted to create a theory that explained why people who differed along the dimensions should behave differently from one another (theories of personality textbook). Eysenck also added reactive inhibition. He borrowed the term from Hulls learning theory. Arousal Theory also came from Eysenck. Eysenck traced the differences in behavior between introverts and extraverts to various parts of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). The ARAS is a network of fibers traveling upward from the lower brainstem to the thalamus and cortex (Theories of personality textbook.) Through Eysenck work he influenced many students of his like Jeffrey Alan Gray. Because of Eysenck theories Jeffrey created the Big Five Model. The Big Five Model consist of 1.Conscientiousness, 2. Agreeableness, 3. Neuroticism, 4. Openness to experience, 5. Extraversion. Some ideas contrast what Eysenck believed in regards to Personality theory. According to Freud ,personality involves several factors like, instinctual drives (food, sex, aggression), unconscious processes and early childhood influences (psychosexual stages). Freud believed that personality development depends on the interplay of instinct and environment during the first five years of life. However Eysenck believed that personality development has nothing to do with the environment the subject lives in but rather genetics and whether a person was naturally extroverted or introverted.

Nevertheless Hans Eysenck is one of the most well-known psychologist of our time. His discoveries and research has made a huge influence today in the psychology field. He was wellknown for his controversy but also for his attitude. Eysenck will always be known as the “Rebel with a cause.”

References Wikipedia contributors. "Hans Eysenck." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 20 Feb. 2016. Web. 26 feb. 2016. "What Is Psychotherapy and How Is It Used?" About.com Health. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. . "What Is Experimental Psychology?" About.com Health. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. .

"Study.com -." Study.com. Web. 02 Mar. 2016. .

"Theories of Personality | Simply Psychology." Theories of Personality | Simply Psychology. Web. 02 Mar. 2016. . Wikipedia contributors. "Neuroticism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 11 Feb. 2016. Web. 2 Mar. 2016. "Why Hans Eysenck Is One of the Most Controversial Psychologists in History." About.com Health. Web. 02 Mar. 2016. “Ryckman, Richard M. Theories of Personality. 9th ed. Maine: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008. Print”.

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