The Four Temperaments
Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic or Phlegmatic?
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For over two thousand years, physicians and philosophers sorted people into four temperaments. Modern psychology kept the idea in a new form: two independent dimensions, how outgoing you are and how strongly and quickly you react emotionally. This test measures both and places you on the classical map.
Answer according to how you usually are, not how you would like to be or how you were on one particular day. There are no good or bad temperaments.
What it measures
Social energy
Reserved ↔ Outgoing
Whether you draw energy from company, activity and stimulation, or from quiet, depth and solitude.
Reserved: You recharge alone or with a few close people, think before you speak and prefer depth to breadth.
Outgoing: You recharge among people and activity, think out loud and seek stimulation and variety.
Emotional reactivity
Steady ↔ Intense
How quickly and strongly your emotions respond to events, and how long the response lasts.
Steady: You are hard to rattle: setbacks and provocations roll off you and your mood stays even.
Intense: You feel things fast and fully: highs are bright, lows sting, and moods can shift quickly.
Possible results
About this test
The four temperaments go back to the Hippocratic theory of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm), which the Greek physician Galen, working in Rome in the second century, tied to personality: an excess of blood made a person sanguine, of yellow bile choleric, of black bile melancholic, and of phlegm phlegmatic. Each humor was linked to a season and a classical element.
The humors are long gone as medicine, but in the twentieth century the psychologist Hans Eysenck, following a suggestion by Wilhelm Wundt, pointed out that the ancient types fit neatly onto two of the most robust dimensions of modern personality research: extraversion (outgoing versus reserved) and neuroticism, here called emotional reactivity (intense and quick to react versus calm and steady). Stable extraverts look sanguine, reactive extraverts choleric, reactive introverts melancholic and stable introverts phlegmatic.
This test scores both dimensions and places you on that map. Most people sit closer to the middle than the descriptions suggest, so your blend (the runner-up temperament) matters as much as the main one. Scores are relative to the range of possible answers, not to population norms, and the result is a lens for reflection, not a diagnosis.
References
- Eysenck, H. J. & Eysenck, M. W. (1985). Personality and Individual Differences.
- Kagan, J. (1994). Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature.
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
The Four Temperaments
About 3 minutes · 28 questions
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