Besides that, he has also worked in numerous fields of psychology proposing various ideas and theories. Born on 4th march in Berlin, German Empire. Initially, he was unable to gain employment in England due to the fact that he was a German citizen but then he was able to acquire his PhD degree from University College, London in Before he passed away, Eysenck was the most cited British psychologist in social science journals.
Eysenck was among the first to use the statistical technique called factor analysis to reduce the number of possible traits down to a specific set of dimensions. Later, he added the third trait of psychoticism. Both models include extraversion and neuroticism as traits and Eysenck's psychoticism includes elements of the Big Five traits conscientiousness and agreeableness. Eysenck also made the argument that there is a biological component to traits.
He claimed that biology combined with the environment to create personality, accounting for the importance of both nature and nurture. Eysenck is known for sparking a great deal of controversy in the field of psychology. One of his major targets was psychoanalysis , which he argued was unscientific. Instead, he was a vocal advocate for behavioral therapy and was largely responsible for establishing clinical psychology in the United Kingdom.
In addition, he claimed that there was no evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. Instead, he said that there was a link between personality, smoking, and cancer. His research on the topic was done with the support of the tobacco industry.
The biggest controversy Eysenck became embroiled in was over intelligence. After his student Arthur Jenson asserted in an article that racial differences in intelligence were inherited, Eysenck defended him.
He fanned the flames of the backlash even more by writing a book on the subject called The IQ Argument: Race, Intelligence, and Education. However, in his autobiography he was more moderate, saying that environment and experience also play a significant role in intelligence. At the time of his death in , he was the most-frequently cited psychologist in scientific journals. Despite this influence, he was also a controversial figure.
His suggestion that racial differences in intelligence were due to genetics rather than environment generated a tremendous amount of conflict. Learn more about his life and influence on psychology in this brief biography. Hans Eysenck was born in Germany to parents who were both noted film and stage actors. After his parents divorced when he was only two, he was raised almost entirely by his grandmother. His antipathy toward Hitler and the Nazis led him to move to England when he was Because of his German citizenship, he found it difficult to find work in England.
He eventually went on to earn a Ph. He later founded the psychology department at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry, where he continued to work until He served as Professor Emeritus at the school until his death in He was also an extremely prolific writer.
Over the course of his career, he published more than 75 books and over 1, journal articles. Prior to his death, he was the most frequently cited living psychologist. In addition to being one of the most famous psychologists, he was also one of the most controversial.
In the paper, Eysenck reported that two-thirds of therapy patients improved significantly or recovered within two years, regardless of whether or not they received psychotherapy. He was also a vocal critic of psychoanalysis, dismissing it as unscientific. You can hear Eysenck describe his views on Freudian theory and psychoanalytic treatment in this video: Hans J. Eysenck, Ph. Lifetalk with Roberta Russell on Psychoanalysis. The greatest controversy surrounding Eysenck was his view of the heritability of intelligence , more specifically his view that racial differences in intelligence could be partially attributed to genetic factors.
His autobiography took a more moderate view that ascribed greater importance to the role of environment and experience in shaping intelligence. While Hans Eysenck was certainly a controversial figure, his wide-ranging research had a major influence on psychology. In addition his work in personality and intelligence, he also played a major role in establishing approaches to clinical training and psychotherapy that were firmly rooted in empirical research and science.
Eysenck, H. Well, imagine the extravert and the introvert both getting drunk, taking off their clothes, and dancing buck naked on a restaurant table. The next morning, the extravert will ask you what happened and where are his clothes. The introvert, on the other hand, will remember every mortifying moment of his humiliation, and may never come out of his room again. Perhaps some of you extraverts can tell me if he describes your experiences well, too -- assuming, of course, that you can remember you experiences!
One of the things that Eysenck discovered was that violent criminals tend to be non-neuroticistic extraverts. This makes common sense, if you think about it: It is hard to imagine somebody who is painfully shy and who remembers their experiences and learns from them holding up a Seven-Eleven! It is even harder to imagine someone given to panic attacks doing so. But please understand that there are many kinds of crime besides the violent kind that introverts and neurotics might engage in!
Another thing Eysenck looked into was the interaction of the two dimensions and what that might mean in regard to various psychological problems. He found, for example, that people with phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder tended to be quite introverted, whereas people with conversion disorders e.
Other introverts will learn quickly and thoroughly particular behaviors that hold off their panic -- such as checking things many times over or washing their hands again and again. Highly neuroticistic extraverts, on the other hand, are good at ignoring and forgetting the things that overwhelm them. They engage in the classic defense mechanisms, such as denial and repression.
Eysenck came to recognize that, although he was using large populations for his research, there were some populations he was not tapping. He began to take his studies into the mental institutions of England. When these masses of data were factor analyzed, a third significant factor began to emerge, which he labeled psychoticism. Like neuroticism, high psychoticism does not mean you are psychotic or doomed to become so -- only that you exhibit some qualities commonly found among psychotics, and that you may be more susceptible, given certain environments, to becoming psychotic.
As you might imagine, the kinds of qualities found in high psychoticistic people include a certain recklessness, a disregard for common sense or conventions, and a degree of inappropriate emotional expression. It is the dimension that separates those people who end up institutions from the rest of humanity! For a highly abbreviated minitest, click here! Hans Eysenck was an iconoclast -- someone who enjoyed attacking established opinion.
He was an early and vigorous critic of the effectiveness of psychotherapy, especially the Freudian variety. He also criticized the scientific nature of much of the academic varieties of psychology. As a hard-core behaviorist, he felt that only the scientific method as he understood it could give us an accurate understanding of human beings. As a statistician, he felt that mathematical methods were essential.
As a physiologically-oriented psychologist, he felt that physiological explanations were the only valid ones. Of course, we can argue with him on all these points: Phenomenology and other qualitative methods are also considered scientific by many.
Some things are not so easily reduced to numbers, and factor analysis in particular is a technique not all statisticians approve of.
And it is certainly debatable that all things must have a physiological explanation -- even B. Skinner, the arch-behaviorist, thought more in terms of conditioning -- a psychological process -- than in terms of physiology. And yet, his descriptions of various types of people, and of how they can be understood physically, ring particularly true. And most parents, teachers, and child psychologists will more than support the idea that kids have built-in differences in their personalities that begin at birth and even before , and which no amount of re-education will touch.
You, of course, have to make up your own mind! It's hard to pick out just a few of Eysenck's books -- there are so many! The more "pop" book is Psychology is about People If you are interested in psychoticism, try Psychoticism as a Dimension of Personality And if you want to understand his view of criminality, see Crime and Personality His unusual, but interesting, theory about personality and cancer and heart disease -- he thinks personality is more significant than smoking, for example!
There have been literally dozens of other attempts at discovering the basic human temperaments. Here are a few of the better known theories. He built upon earlier work done by Ernst Kretschmer in the 's. Kretschmer believed that there was a relationship between three different physical types and certain psychological disorders. Specifically, he believed that the short, round pyknic type was more prone to cyclothymic or bipolar disorders, and that the tall thin asthenic type a too a lesser degree the muscular athletic thype was more prone to schizophrenia.
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