Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIV. Dispositional Theories 14. Eysenck, McCrae, and
Costa’s Trait and Factor
Theories© The McGraw−Hill^409
Companies, 2009the Nazi secret police, an idea he found so repugnant that he decided to leave
Germany.
This encounter with the fascist right and his later battles with the radical left
suggested to him that the trait of tough-mindedness, or authoritarianism, was equally
prevalent in both extremes of the political spectrum. He later found some scientific
support for this hypothesis in a study that demonstrated that although communists
were radical and fascists were conservative on one dimension of personality, on the
tough-minded versus tender-minded dimension, both groups were authoritarian,
rigid, and intolerant of ambiguity (tough-minded) (Eysenck, 1954; Eysenck & Coul-
ter, 1972).
As a consequence of Nazi tyranny, Eysenck, at age 18, left Germany and even-
tually settled in England, where he tried to enroll in the University of London. As we
saw in the chapter opening vignette, he went into psychology completely by acci-
dent. At that time, the psychology department at the University of London was basi-
cally pro-Freudian, but it also had a strong emphasis on psychometrics, with Charles
Spearman having just left and with Cyril Burt still presiding. Eysenck received a
bachelor’s degree in 1938, about the same time that he married Margaret Davies,
a Canadian with a degree in mathematics. In 1940, he was awarded a PhD from
the University of London, but by this time England and most European nations
were at war.
As a German national, he was considered an enemy alien and not allowed to
enter the Royal Air Force (his first choice) or any other branch of the military. In-
stead, with no training as a psychiatrist or as a clinical psychologist, he went to work
at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital, treating patients who were suffering from a va-
riety of psychological symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and hysteria.
Eysenck, however, was not comfortable with most of the traditional clinical diag-
nostic categories. Using factor analysis, he found that two major personality factors—
neuroticism/emotional stability and extraversion/introversion—could account for all
the traditional diagnostic groups. These early theoretical ideas led to the publication
of his first book, Dimensions of Personality(Eysenck, 1947).
After the war, he became director of the psychology department at Maudsley
Hospital and later became a reader in psychology at the University of London. In
1949, he traveled to North America to examine the clinical psychology programs in
the United States and Canada with the idea of setting up a clinical psychology pro-
fession in Great Britain. He obtained a visiting professorship at the University of
Pennsylvania for the year 1949–1950, but he spent much of that year traveling
throughout the United States and Canada looking over clinical psychology programs,
which he found to be totally inadequate and unscientific (Eysenck, 1980, 1997b).
Eysenck and his wife had been growing steadily apart, and his marriage was
not improved when his traveling companion to Philadelphia was Sybil Rostal, a
beautiful quantitative psychologist. On returning to England, Eysenck obtained a di-
vorce from his first wife and married Sybil. Hans and Sybil Eysenck coauthored sev-
eral publications, and their marriage produced three sons and a daughter. Eysenck’s
son from his first marriage, Michael, is a widely published author of psychology ar-
ticles and books.
After returning from North America, Eysenck established a clinical psychol-
ogy department at the University of London and in 1955 became professor of
Chapter 14 Eysenck, McCrae, and Costa’s Trait and Factor Theories 403