Why You Are The Way You Are

Before continuing with my interest , I want to highlight that the title of this blog post has already been subtitled in a famous book The Birth Order Book , a 1982
non-fiction book by Dr. Kevin Leman on Birth Order and its potential influence on Personality and Development. As per my interests, I found this book worth holding out till the end.
The Idea of writing this blog post came to me while reading the magnificent history of Personality Assessment. I believe, the very first objective of studying psychology that comes to a naive mind is to understand the ways in which people behave & why they behave so. They are of immediate interest to family, friends & neighbours, for whom the behaviour of a certain person is likely to have direct consequence.
Here, via this post I aim to generalize a small concept of Personality Assessment & Related Fields in a lucid manner to the masses.
••In regard to personality tests, one finds that the first name is of Greek Physician Hippocrates. He theorised that everyone has four fluids (The Humoural Theory) : Blood, Phlegm (respiratory secretions), Yellow bile & Black bile. Another Greek Physician pointed out that based on these body fluids, there are four 'temperaments', viz., Sanguine, Phlegm, Choleric & Melancholic respectively.
-The Sanguine person is supposed to be warm, optimistic & confident.
-The Phlegmatic body brings about a temperament which is sluggish, apathetic & indifferent.
- The Choleric body consists of violence, anger & aggression.
-The Melancholic body includes sadness, depression & melancholy.
••Different from the mainstream, then in 1958, based on the famous Jung's theory psychologists developed types of personality which were to be decided based on the four questions, as given below :
1) Preferred source of your energy? (Internal or External)
2) Preferred source of perception? (Senses or Intuition)
3) Preferred decision making system? (On Logics or Feelings)
4) Preferred life style? (Ordered or Adaptable)
••One more interesting theory that assumed that human personality is a reflection of physical body is Somatotype theory. This theory divides people into three major types:
a) The Ectomorph (who is thin & fragile)
b) The Mesomorph (who is powerful & muscular)
c) The Endomorph (who is round, soft and fat).
As most individuals have a combination of these three body types, the personality characteristics are determined by the relative proportions of the body type factors in their individual somatotype. [somato- of or relating to the human or animal body.]
This is just a bit of fascination. There are much more rich & interesting facts regarding Assessment of Personality deepening one's attraction towards psychology.