Approach and Avoidance Temperaments

Introduction

The search for basic building blocks of personality is an old enterprise, formally commencing with Galen's typological conceptualization based on humors. Contemporary models of personality structure primarily focus on continuous dimensions rather than discrete typologies. Regardless of whether they are discrete or dimensional, these portraits of personality seek to uncover the core dispositions that are responsible for consistency in human behavior.

Three popular approaches to the search for basic components of personality are the trait adjective approach, the affective disposition approach, and the motivational system approach. Each of these three approaches has made important contributions to the personality psychology literature, but there has been little attempt, to date, to examine the degree of convergence or overlap among them. Herein ...