A biochemical approach to the study of personality.
- 1 July 1928
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
- Vol. 23 (2) , 158-175
- https://doi.org/10.1037/h0072558
Abstract
Biochemistry offers a fruitful means of studying personality, inasmuch as certain chemical determinations appear to be definitely correlated with personality traits. Preliminary experimentation indicates tendencies for the following relationships to hold: (1) The least excitable individuals tend to have the most acid urine and saliva, while more excitable persons tend toward neutrality or alkalinity of their fluids. (2) The least aggressive subjects appear to excrete the greatest amounts of acid as measured by the formol titration and to have the highest alkali reserve of the blood, while more aggressive individuals seems to show opposite characteristics. (3) Emotional excitability tends to bear an inverse relationship to the presence of creatinine in the blood and its excretion in the urine. (4) Phosphorus metabolism appears to be bound up with personality in some way, but the details of the relationship are not yet clear. The degree of the relationships found to exist between chemical determinations and personality traits is that expressed by coefficients of correlation between .20 and .30. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)Keywords
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