Temperaments: A Brief History

The first known personality delineation was created by Hippocrates (the father of medicine) and dates back to nearly 500 years B.C. Hippocrates described four basic personality types, which he coined “temperaments”. His descriptions of the four basic types have been used in one form or another since that time. As a result, the four basic temperaments have to their credit more than two thousand years of research as to validity and reliability.

In their true forms, temperaments describe the general tendencies we are born with and how these tendencies affect our needs, abilities, likes and dislikes, as well as personal and interpersonal styles of behavior. However, individuals are sometimes nurtured or conditioned away from their natural tendencies. This can occur in childhood when a parent, teacher, or other influential adult conditions the child to be different, or in adulthood as a means of adjusting to social expectations or current circumstances. In many cases, once the individual has matured or moved beyond the circumstance, they move naturally back to their nature. However, when childhood conditioning has been strong, the individual may not know how to move beyond a false self image, or may not know it even exists. Such people go about their lives never feeling quite right about who they are, wishing they could be different, but not understanding why or how.

Single dimensional profiles that measure temperaments and conclude that the results reflect an individual's true nature, often provide erroneous information that perpetuates and validates a path of negative conditioning. The developers of the CORE Multidimensional Awareness Profile designed Part 1 to provide an accurate and reliable measure of the four basic temperaments based on measuring an individual's internal representations of self. Sometimes self-perception is absolutely accurate and is validated by the other measures of CORE MAP. Other times, however, the multiple measures of CORE MAP reveal a very different picture.

Your CORE Facilitator will help you determine whether you are functioning from your natural tendencies (your nature), or from imposed rules and expectations (your nurture). Generally, functioning from your nature and compatible nurturing is comfortable, while functioning from nurture that is incompatible with your nature is uncomfortable. To move toward comfort and personal effectiveness, it is important to discover your true nature and to begin to develop the strengths and assets inherent to it.