Psychological classifications

Classification is one of the basic devices used by psychologists for the description of distinctions between people. The problem of finding the essencial grounds for the classification psychological types, that is the grounds determing a more broad spectrum of derivative characteristics has always been crucial for the differential psychology.

Historical background

The logic of development of classification hypotheses in psychology

The entire history of human studies from the system-classification position reveals itself as arena of struggle of two opposite methodological directions, the goals of which were:

1) to "catch" the central organizing link, some kind of the motor of all design, and to distribute people by the qualitative specificity of these central links;

«The typological approach consists in the global perception of the person with the following reduction of variety of individual forms to a small number of the groups uniting around the representative type» (Meili, 1960).

2) to decompose the psychic to its components in order to understand the work of parts and to create a classification on the basis of differences in the structure and quality of parts.

«It is necessary to reduce all the personality character traits to the elementary mental elements and to the elementary forms of the basic psychological laws, revealing the nature of the discovered ties» (Polan, 1894).

At present there are several thousand of various psychological classifications that point to these or other distinctions between people or mental characteristics as such.

The classifications may have different ground scales of generalizations, degree of inner strictness.

Classification of people and classification of psychological charachteristics

The logic of psychological classifications development demanded parallel existing of two scientific approaches: one of which was named «psychology of types», and the other — «psychology of traits». In the course of time both the approaches shifted towards each other: the psychology of types - in attempts to understand the structure of psychological traits of every type, trait psychology - in attempts to achieve more high and system generalizations.

«As soon as the fact that the observable traits do not corresponds to separate essential psychic characteristics and rather are only aspects of the personality and behavior, received general recognition immediately appeared the necessity to reveal the fundamental factors behind the traits. Haimans and Virsma as well as other scientists after them tried to solve the problem. However all these researches had a fragmentary character, their results have been caused by preliminary hypotheses, and the choice of traits as a rule was determined by the personal view of the researcher» R.Maili с.228

An example of trait psychology development (stages):

1. Singling out the types of love as psychology of traits. In the Antique time the typology of love kinds was very popular, which comprised:

• Eros – a passionate physical and emotional love based on aesthetic enjoyment; stereotype of romantic love
• Ludus – a love that is played as a game or sport; conquest
• Storge – an affectionate love that slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity ( kindred to Philia )
• Pragma – love that is driven by the head, not the heart; undemonstrative
• Mania – highly volatile love; obsession; fueled by low self-esteem
• Agape – selfless altruistic love; spiritual; motherly love

1. Every person, as a rule, possesses all the possible types of love, but in different proportion. Which can be expressed by the profile characteristic with ups and downs.

1. The Types of people with similar profile characteristics combined into classification of higher level.

The example of type psychology development (stages):

1. Singling out groups of people that have obvious dominate of conscious cognitive operations — "Rationals" or unconscious operation out — "Irrationals".
2. Pick out the specific cognitive abilities connected with rationality and irrationality.
3. A network for the profile characteristic is worked out which is typical for rationals and irrationals.

In the course of development of psychological as a science and practice understanding comes that human is «microcosm» which has all traits properties and characteristics but they are distributed according to certain systemic lows, which should be yet discovered.