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Sheldon’s Temperaments and Traits While the Sheldon’s research started from body type’s classification, that was not his ultimate goal. He wanted to help resolve a more critical question of whether our body type was connected with the way we acted. In short, he wanted to explore the link between body and temperament. Temperament explores how people eat and sleep, laugh and snore, speak and walk. Temperament is body type in action. Sheldon's procedure in looking for the basic components of temperament was much like the one he used in discovering the body type components. He interviewed in depth several hundred people and tried to find traits which would describe the basic elements of their behavior. He found there were three basic components which he called viscerotonia, somatotonia and cerebrotonia, and eventually named endotonia, mesotonia and ectotonia. Endotonia is seen in the love of relaxation, comfort, food and people. Mesotonia is centered on assertiveness and a love of...

Who was William Sheldon? William Sheldon (1898-1977) was an American psychologist who devoted his life to observing the variety of human bodies and temperaments. He taught and did research at a number of U.S. Universities and is best known for his series of books on the human constitution. He was a keen observer of animals and birds as a child, and he turned this talent to good effect by becoming an avid people-watcher, and out of his observations he gradually elaborated his typology. The Basic Components of Physique For his study of the human physique, Dr. Sheldon started with 4,000 photographs of college-age men, which showed front, back and side views. By carefully examining these photos he discovered that there were three fundamental elements which, when combined together, made up all these physiques or somatotypes. With great effort and ingenuity he worked out ways to measure these three components and to express them numerically so that every human body could be described in term...