ABSTRACT
THE honour of having carried out the first pioneering studies in this field goes to the London school, particularly to Charles Spearman (1927) who did so much to furnish psychology with a useable method of factor analysis. He was familiar with Gross's theory and with the work of Heymans and Wiersma, and at his suggestion Webb (1915) was the first to use the method of factor analysis in the non-intellectual field. He intercorrelated and factor analysed ratings made of students and schoolboys and discovered in this work a factor which he called (w), using the initial of the word ‘will’; this he and later writers interpreted as the opposite of the factor of emotionality, i.e. a tendency not to over-react emotionally but to have a stable type of personality. Additional analyses of this material were carried out by Garnet (1918), McCloy (1936), Reyburn and Taylor (1939) and others and they all agreed that another factor rather similar to extraversion-introversion was contained in these data. Burt (1915), another member of the London school, also carried out a factor analytic study of 172 school children as well as another one on 329 adults and children, who were rated on eleven traits. He too claims the discovery of a general factor of emotionality, which he labelled ‘e’. Later work by the same author (Burt, 1937, 1939, 1940) contains further support for this factor of emotionality, which he considers to be obverse of Webb's ‘w’, and for a factor of extraversion-introversion. Burt's most recent study (1948) also supports this two factor scheme.
