Hans Eysenck Essay

Hans Eysenck was born in Germany in March of 1916 and died in September of 1997 at the age of 81. He eventually moved to England, being that he and his family were Jewish and the Nazi regime was growing in power. While in England he attended University College in London where he received his PhD in 1940. He spent nearly thirty years of his life as a psychology professor at King’s College. He wrote the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences during that time period. Eysenck won a number of APA awards such as the Presidential Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Society and the William James Fellow Award. By the time he died Eysenck was the most cited psychologist in scientific journals.

Eysenck is best known for his contributions

He referred to these as super traits and studied the way people responded to external and internal stimuli looking for a pattern or a trend. After the response to a stimuli becomes constant, that response then becomes a habit. When similar habits occur, the habits then become traits. Upon further research, Eysenck realized that people weren’t simply one thing or another, but that there was a spectrum for these super

Eysenck created his Personality Questionnaire as a useful tool when assessing traits. Not only did he make contribution to psychology through the field of personality, he also studied the role of genetics in intelligence and analyzed psychotherapy. Due to his study of psychotherapy, reforms were made in regards to its practice. Psychotherapists began to use psychotherapy outcome research and studies regarding the effectiveness of psychotherapy became more common. Eysenck’s pe+rsonality model helps us to better understand how a set of behaviors can be the result of someone’s personality and how where you fall on the spectrum of particular traits can contribute to your personality. Furthermore, through his work and research we are able to see that certain traits such as neuroticism and introversion or extroversion are fundamental personality traits that can be found all over the world, specifically seen through his personality