What Is Temperament? And Where Does It Come From?

Temperament is a general word for the personality traits you’re born with. It starts from from the process of your conception to when you took your first breathe at birth. It is the genotypical traits you inherited from your forbears. These genes were transferred to you during conception from your great-grandparents to your grandparents then to your parents and you’ll no doubt also pass them on to your children. Some persons inherited more genes from their grandparents than their parents, and this could be the reason why you can trace their characters and behaviours back to their great-grandparents and grandparents. However, all these inherited genes combines to make the individual who they are, and which is also responsible for their personality traits. Among other influence in a person’s life, temperament has the most profound and overwhelming influence and control in how he acts, reacts and behaves. Temperament follows us all through life, nothing changes it. Perhaps, educations, level of exposure in life, societal influences and experiences may try or attempt to modify or tweak it, but it really does not change. This is obviously the main reason why you can hardly find two persons with different temperaments acting or reacting to issues the same way or behaving and doing things in similar way eventhough they were exposed to similar influences.

There are four different influences in a person’s life. These influences could be combined in one person, since they inherited two or more temperaments from either of the parents or grand- parents in different proportions. But there’ll always be a primary and dominant one which influences their character more than the others. Let us meet the four basic temperaments which has different influences on the character of different persons and makes them unique, and they’ll often be seen yielding to the influence of their primary and predominant temperament.

From the illustration above, it shows that the temperaments are divided into: extroverts and introverts. Sanguines and Cholerics are classified as extroverts, while Melancholies and Phlegmatics are introverts. But there are other class of persons who are neither pure extroverts nor introverts since they combine two or more opposite temperaments in varying proportions. They are intermediates, or rather called “ambiverts”.