ABSTRACT
Psychological studies are needed to link up both smoking and cancer proneness with specific personality types. This chapter demonstrates such a link between personality and smoking and considers very briefly the description and measurement of personality. The concept of personality in psychology is a very confused one and the term is used by many different people in many different ways. There are two definitions or ways of looking at personality. The first of these may be called the behaviouristic view. A quite different way of looking at personality is the so-called dynamic or psychoanalytic approach. The oldest and still very popular method of describing personality was in terms of types. Everyone has heard of the four temperaments originally put forward by Hippocrates and later made popular in Europe by Galen, a Greek physician who lived in the second century of our era. According to their view there were four main types: the melancholic, the choleric, the sanguine and the phlegmatic.
