Four temperaments: origin, science and a test

The four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic) are a classification from ancient medicine that psychology kept as a way to talk about differences between people. The original explanation, based on the humors of the body, has been abandoned; what remains is the question of temperament, the part of personality tied to biology and emotion.

At a birthday dinner around a long table, there is always someone who takes over the conversation, someone who watches in silence, someone who gets angry fast and gets over it just as fast, and someone who is never in a hurry. When somebody drops a screenshot of their temperament test result into the group chat, the old labels start circulating again. The Type of You Four Temperaments Test picks them up with two modern axes and no pretense of diagnosis.

The four temperaments are an ancient idea for describing differences in character

The four temperaments are an idea from ancient Greek medicine for explaining why people react differently, and today they are known as a historical model.

Martins, Silva and Mutarelli (2008) reconstruct that history in a Portuguese-language article, “A teoria dos temperamentos: do corpus hippocraticum ao século XIX” (The theory of temperaments: from the Hippocratic corpus to the nineteenth century, our translation), published in the journal Memorandum. Their starting point is the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of about seventy works that tradition attributes to Hippocrates. According to the authors, style and subject matter change from one work to another, and everything suggests they are not by a single author but, very likely, by several. Some, such as On the Nature of Man, speak of four humors of the body (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) and hold that health depends on their being in proportion. Several of the sources cited here are in Portuguese or Spanish, and the quotations from them are our translations.

Galen, a physician of the second century, took up that idea and carried it over to character. In his view, each person is born with a mixture of humors of their own, in which one or two almost always dominate, and that mixture influences the body and the way a person is. His classification can accommodate the four basic temperaments that Western medicine adopted for centuries: sanguine, choleric (or bilious), melancholic and phlegmatic. Martins and colleagues, citing Temkin, note that in his work De temperamentis Galen came to consider nine possible mixtures, not just four.

The word “melancholy” keeps that origin: it comes from Greek and means “black bile,” as Cortés and Herrera-Aliaga (2023) recall. Another classification into four groups circulates today with letters instead of humors, the one that sorts personality by blood type A, B, O and AB. That is a separate matter, and the guide on blood type and personality looks at what the research says about it.

The qualities of each humor (hot, cold, dry, moist) belong to Galenic medicine, according to Martins and colleagues. The humoral theory has been left behind.

From Galen to Wundt and Eysenck: how the humors became two axes

The four names outlived the humoral theory and in the twentieth century were reinterpreted with two behavioral axes, first with Wundt and then with Eysenck.

During the Middle Ages the idea of the four temperaments was widely accepted, and Galen’s ideas kept their influence until the nineteenth century, when most physicians stopped using them (Martins and colleagues, 2008). Traces remain in everyday language: being in “good humor” or “bad humor,” “temperamental,” and the Spanish word humorista (humorist), which once named someone who studied the humors.

It is Eysenck, of the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, who tells the passage into the twentieth century, in a 1964 article, “Principles and methods of personality description, classification and diagnosis.” According to Eysenck, the system owes much of its popularity to Kant during the two hundred years before 1964. For Kant, each person was melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine or choleric, with no mixtures allowed. Wundt (1903), whom Eysenck presents as the most notable modern defender of Galen’s system, preferred a dimensional reading, with two principles in the reactivity of the affects: the strength and the speed of change of feelings. We did not read the works of Kant or Wundt; what is said about them here is what Eysenck reports.

Eysenck’s Figure 1 shows two continuous axes, introversion-extraversion and stable-unstable, and places the four temperaments on them: the melancholic, introverted and unstable; the choleric, extraverted and unstable; the phlegmatic, introverted and stable; the sanguine, extraverted and stable. He also notes that Wundt called the first axis “slow-quick” and the second “strong-weak.” That is Eysenck’s interpretation, in 1964, of an old system, and not an independent confirmation that the four types exist.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rudolf Steiner took up the same four names within an educational theory of his own. Martins and colleagues describe it as different from the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition and without empirical basis.

The four temperaments on two axes: social energy and emotional intensity

With Wundt’s two principles, the four temperaments line up on a plane of two axes, and the Type of You test uses two axes that recall that plane, as an editorial analogy.

Those two principles, as Eysenck cites them, are enough to describe each temperament: the sanguine combines weak affects with fast change; the choleric, strong affects with fast change; the melancholic, strong affects with slow change; and the phlegmatic, weak affects with slow change. In that citation, Wundt adds that fast-changing temperaments respond more to the impressions of the moment, while slow ones are more occupied with the future and with their own ideas.

The Type of You test presents itself as the four classic temperaments “re-measured on two modern axes”: social energy, outward or inward, and emotional intensity, intense or calm. These axes and those of Wundt and Eysenck have something in common, with no demonstrated equivalence: Wundt speaks of the strength and speed of change of the affects; Eysenck, of introversion-extraversion and stability; the test, of social energy and emotional intensity. It is an editorial analogy: it does not mean that the test measures Eysenck’s model or repeats his method.

The test has 28 questions, takes about 5 minutes and is free. They are everyday scenes, from the group chat to a meeting with the boss and a birthday dinner, and the result shows a primary and a secondary temperament, how much of each of the four you have in percentages, and a temperament map. It is entertainment and self-reflection, not a psychological or medical diagnosis.

What science says today: the humors were discarded, temperament is still studied

Medicine discarded the humoral theory, but temperament remains a subject of study in psychology, with a genetic component and, according to a 2002 article, no single definition.

Cortés and Herrera-Aliaga (2023) put it bluntly in a letter to the Revista Médica de Chile: at present, the humoral theory “is rejected” (our translation). Martins and colleagues agree that most physicians abandoned it in the nineteenth century, and both texts point out that inherited expressions still remain, such as the Spanish “mal humor” (bad mood).

Temperament, on the other hand, remains in research. According to MedlinePlus Genetics, from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, it includes traits such as sociability, emotionality, activity level, attention and persistence. Scientists estimate that between 20 and 60 percent of temperament is determined by genetics, but there is no clear pattern of inheritance or a specific gene that determines each trait: many genetic variations combine, and the environment also has an influence. The same page indicates that temperament stays fairly constant, especially during adulthood.

Nor was there agreement, two decades ago, on what exactly it is. Izquierdo Martínez (2002) wrote that a definition of temperament “sufficiently agreed upon” had still not been reached, largely because of the very different interests of those who study it, and that the term had suffered a heavy inflation in psychology. Rothbart (2007), in the article “Temperament, Development, and Personality,” reviews the structure of temperament and its relation to the Big Five personality traits, and discusses its link to development and to psychopathology. We read only the abstract of that article.

The classic four types remain, then, as an old way of describing differences. That temperament exists as an object of study does not validate those four types.

Temperament, character and personality are not the same thing

Temperament, character and personality resemble each other but are not synonyms: temperament relates to the biological or constitutional bases, and personality and character cover the whole person, the innate and the acquired.

That is how Izquierdo Martínez (2002) sums it up. Anglo-American authors leaned toward “personality” and Europeans toward “character,” and both terms refer to all the levels at which a person functions: thinking and feeling, behavior and mood, body and soul. For Allport, cited in that text, temperament is a kind of “raw material” that ends up shaping personality, and he stresses its emotional qualities and its relative invariability compared with other components of personality.

Outside academia the boundaries blur: the MedlinePlus Genetics page itself (in Spanish) writes “el temperamento o carácter” (temperament or character) as if they were one thing. With that mixing of terms, it stays unclear which of the three a test that promises to say “what you’re like” refers to.

Other models cover the whole personality, such as the 16 personality types or the Big Five traits; temperament, by contrast, is one of its parts. High sensitivity is a different concept, with its own guide on the highly sensitive person, and the emotional intensity in a test is not the same as it.

Melancholic does not mean depression

Melancholic is the classic name of a temperament, not a diagnosis, and it does not mean depression.

In the ancient theory, “melancholy” named an excess of black bile and was associated with sadness, according to Cortés and Herrera-Aliaga (2023). That vocabulary belongs to an abandoned theory. In Wundt’s two principles, the melancholic is described by strong affects and slow change, that is, by how a person reacts. The Type of You test uses the name the same way: its Melancholic result is about thinking and feeling deeply, not about depression.

Depression is something else. The World Health Organization (2026) describes it as a common mental disorder, different from regular mood changes and from feelings about everyday life. In a depressive episode there is a depressed mood (sadness, irritability, a feeling of emptiness) or a loss of pleasure or interest in activities, for most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks.

A temperament test diagnoses nothing, not even when the result says melancholic. If what the WHO describes sounds like what you have been feeling for weeks, or you are simply worried about how you have been, it is worth talking it over with a health professional; no test result replaces that conversation.

How to use your result without boxing yourself in

A temperament result is useful for getting to know yourself better and for having something to talk about, not for boxing you in or diagnosing you.

The Four Temperaments Test gives you a primary temperament, a secondary one and how much of each of the four you have. That kind of result fits, in our reading, with the underlying idea of Wundt, who according to Eysenck preferred to think in quantities that vary along two continuous scales rather than in closed boxes.

The result reflects how you answered that time, and the test itself says it is a good way to learn about yourself and start a conversation with friends. In the group chat, a screenshot is a way to ask whether the others recognize you in it. A label also isn’t enough to decide who is right for a job, to explain a relative’s character, or to take for granted how someone will react in a meeting or a job interview.

The full result also includes a reading of what you are like at work, in love and under stress, and of how you get along with the other three temperaments. These are readings to reflect on and compare with your own experience. The Enneagram is another type system used to talk about ways of being, with the same caveat: no type system replaces getting to know a person.