Hans Jurgen Eysenck's Psychological Theories

Eysenck was the son of a German "actor father and film star mother" who were divorced shortly after his birth (Brand 68). He was raised by his maternal grandmother who later, being badly crippled, was sent to die in a Nazi concentration camp. His mother had remarried, to a Jewish film producer, and the "intelligent and independent-minded schoolchild" frequently found himself opposing the anti-Semitic propaganda of his schoolteachers (Brand 68). Eysenck emigrated to England in 1934 "as a protest against the Nazi movement" and attempted to join the Royal Air Force (Wilson 426). His German origins barred him from the British military but he served the war effort as a fire watcher in the London Blitz.

In London Eysenck enrolled at University College London i

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enck claimed that the extraversion-introversion spectrum of personality types was affected by variations in "the function of the ascending reticular activating system" which produces arousal in the brain in response to external stimuli (Wilson 427). This arousal, Eysenck proposed, was higher for extraverted individuals and was behind all the experimental differences that had been observed between extraverted and introverted subjects. A great deal of Eysenck's work, and that of his followers, has consisted of experiments testing the proposed "connection between personality dimensions and various kinds of laboratory performance" in the effort to demonstrate the biological basis of personality (Wilson 428). Eysenck's theory of personality falls, therefore, into the group of theories which focus on the identification and quantification of distinctive traits and "measuring personality by using psychometric tests" (Hayes 239). Eysenck's theory rests on the claim that the major aspects of human personality can be divided into two groups constituting distinctive traits, extraversion and introversion, which can be measured using psychometric tests. He was not, strictly speaking, a behaviorist, and referred to himself as such because
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