temperament and personality typing:
what are Types?

background
Typing relates to an expansion and explanation of human personality developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung and later popularized by Isabel Briggs Myers.

Type relies on a division of human information processing: perceiving (taking in information) and ordering (making decisions). Jung suggested that people have inborn preferences for both perceiving and judging which manifest over time. Perception occurs either through sensing or intuition and ordering is by thinking or feeling. Jung called these the "four functions which determine what information people attend to and their preferred process for making decisions. People have one of these four functions as their dominant function, also called "superior function." Jung also added a third factor, "attitude preference" relating to the orientation one takes towards the world: extravert or introvert.

what are types?
Psychological types become discernable as children mature and by the the late teens one can consistently recognize both attitude preference and superior function. Temperament type is useful on a practical basis because as temperamental preference becomes fixed, we can then make reliable assesment of people's personality, learning habits, and communication skills, to name a few areas.

Jung's typology was popularized in the United States by Myers-Briggs who added a fourth factor -- the judging-perceiving preference which relates to the propensity to stop perception to make a decision. The judging type does this sooner than the perceiving type.

The 4 letter typing schema separates temperament into 16 different types depending upon these preferences: E or I (Extravert or Introvert); S or N (Sensing or Intuition); T or F (Thinking or Feeling); P or J (Perceiving or Judging).

references
1. C. G. Jung. Psychological Types, trans. by H. G. Baynes, rev. by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 (originally published in 1921).

2. Myers-Briggs, Isabel. Gifts Differing, CRP Books, 1993.

(This article also took excerpts from the Webpage of Association for Psychological Type,1996 by APT, All Rights Reserved)
Copyright 2001, 2005, Robert I. Winer, M.D.