TEMPERAMENT

“Temperament …refers to an individual’s emotional nature, including his susceptibility to emotional stimulation, his customary strength and speed of response, the quality of his prevailing mood, and all peculiarities of fluctuation and intensity in mood, these phenomena being regarded as dependent upon constitutional make-up, and therefore largely hereditary in nature.”
-GW Allport

“It may be said, simply, that severe emotional upsets ordinarily tend to subside, but that mild emotional states, when often provoked or long maintained, tend to persist, as it were, autonomously…a dramatic attack of mania or melancholia…may have far less effect on the course of a man’s life than some deceptively mild affective illness which goes on so long that it becomes inveterate.”
-AJ Lewis

Temperament describes the baseline setting of mood and energy of an individual. Temperament is probably inherited and precedes personality development, determining, according to Allport, “the ‘internal weather’ in which personality evolves.”

Kraepelin described temperaments as ‘rudiments’ of MDI and distinguished a dysthymic (depressive), a hyperthymic (manic), a cyclothymic, and an irritable temperament. (Akiskal)