Correlation between Personality Types and Temperament

Personality types are based on people's preferences for:
1. Extroversion or introversion
2. Intuition or sensing
3. Thinking or feeling
4. Judging or perceiving

Temperaments are based on factors of people's central nervous system:
1. Strength (strong or weak)
2. Balance (balanced or unbalanced)
3. Mobility (mobile or inert)

Sanguine temperament is characterized by strong, balanced, and mobile central nervous system.
Phlegmatic temperament is characterized by strong, balanced, and inert central nervous system.
Choleric temperament is characterized by strong, unbalanced, and mobile central nervous system.
Melancholic temperament is characterized by weak, unbalanced, and inert central nervous system.

Other combinations give mixed temperaments. However, one of them is domineering.

According to Eysenck, two factors of his tests EPI and EPQ indicate a person's temperament. These factors are extroversion / introversion and emotional stability / instability.

Sanguine temperament is extroverted and emotionally stable.
Phlegmatic temperament is introverted and emotionally stable.
Choleric temperament is extroverted and emotionally unstable.
Melancholic temperament is introverted and emotionally unstable.

Since temperaments and personality types include extroversion / introversion, there should be some correlation between them in this factor. Actually, the scales for extroversion / introversion in EPI/EPQ and MBTI are different and the descriptions of extroversion and introversion are somewhat different. This means that they do not match exactly.

The other scale for temperaments is emotional stability / instability. This scale indicates a person's emotionality. MBTI has a scale of thinking / feeling. It looks like a thinking person might be more emotionally stable, and a feeling person might be more emotionally unstable. However, it might not be so because in MBTI both thinking and feeling are rational processes.

There were some studies of correlation between MBTI and EPQ. The same people took both tests. Mainly, these studies showed that there was some correlation between the scales of extroversion / introversion in both tests. There was no correlation of EPQ scale of emotional stability / instability with any MBTI scale. There was also some correlation between MBTI scale of judging / perceiving and the third scale of EPQ - psychoticism. The low scores on this scale indicate a person's agreeableness, the high scores indicate that a person has a tendency to asocial behavior. However, this scale is not used in temperaments.

This means that personality types and temperaments have some correlation on extroversion / introversion.

In addition, both personality types and temperaments are inborn and unchangeable and both supposedly depend on brain activity. This means that they do have something in common, though they are different.

This means that a combination of a personality type and temperament gives more complete model of a person's inborn and unchangeable psychological characteristics. Since in MBTI all the scales are independent and the same is in EPQ, and there is a correlation between two scales of MBTI and EPQ, it looks like there are five inborn and unchangeable personality factors:
1. Extroversion / introversion
2. Intuition / sensing
3. Thinking / feeling
4. Judging / perceiving
5. Emotional stability / instability

This model is different from the five-factor model used in Big5. It looks like nobody proved that all the five factors of Big5 are inborn and unchangeable. Big5 was an attempt to simplify Cattell's 16PF test that has 16 scales, but many of them correlate with one another. The five factors of Big5 were an attempt to select the independent factors among 16 factors of 16PF. However, the scores on some of the scales of 16PF can change.

Actually, there are disagreements among psychologists whether there are five main factors of personality as in Big5 or three main factors as in EPQ. However, Big5 includes all the factors of EPQ. Neither Big5 nor EPQ include scales for intuition / sensing and thinking / feeling which indicate some of people's inborn preferences. Big5 and EPQ do not have any scales that correlate with these two scales of MBTI.