True Colors
In psychology, personality refers to the emotion, thought, behavior patterns unique to the individual. Our personalities influence one’s tendencies such as a preference for introversion or extroversion. The True Colors assessment educated me about myself; I understand my personality in many different means. I now know what my personality lacks and I can work on those elements to be able to understand/read people better in my everyday life. In 1921, Carl Jung published the book “Psychological Types,” which proposed a concept of psychological types based on introversion versus extraversion, thinking versus feeling as rational functions, sensation versus intuition as irrational functions, and the coexistence of principal and auxiliary functions. Jung was part of a test made for sixteen personality types, called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. In a two-page chart, all of the sixteen types were described briefly. David West Keirsey is an internationally renowned psychologist, a former professor at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. David Keirsey recognized these very brief sixteen descriptions as being accurate, mirroring his observations as a school psychologist, and used these descriptions as a basis in a greatly expanded and modified form of his own. Keirsey's critical innovation was organizing these types into four temperaments (Apollonian, Promethean, Epimethean, and Dionysian) and describing observable behavior rather than speculation about unobservable thoughts and feelings. Keirsey provided his own definitions of the sixteen types, and related them to the four temperaments based on his studies of five behavioral sciences: anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology, and sociology. In 1978, Don Lowry became aware of the work of David Keirsey. Don Lowry believed there were fundamental and universal applications of Keirsys work. “But… to remember it, it needed to be FUN!” True Colors was born in 1978