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The ambivert: A failed attempt at a normal personality
Author(s) -
Davidson Ian J.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/jhbs.21868
Subject(s) - personality , extraversion and introversion , psychology , context (archaeology) , social psychology , eysenck personality questionnaire , personality type , big five personality traits , focus (optics) , history , physics , archaeology , optics
Recently, attention has been drawn toward an overlooked and nearly forgotten personality type: the ambivert. This paper presents a genealogy of the ambivert, locating the various contexts it traversed in order to highlight the ways in which these places and times have interacted and changed—ultimately elucidating our current situation. Proposed by Edmund S. Conklin in 1923, the ambivert only was meant for normal persons in between the introvert and extravert extremes. Although the ambivert could have been taken up by early personality psychologists who were transitioning from the study of the abnormal to the normal, it largely failed to gain traction. Whether among psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, or applied and personality psychologists, the ambivert was personality non grata . It was only within the context of Eysenck's integrative view of types and traits that the ambivert marginally persisted up to the present day and is now the focus of sales management and popular psychology.