Definition
A depressive personality style is characterized by a constellation of traits including: joyless, despondent, insecure, guilt-prone, ruminative, indecisive, anxious, quiet and shy, and lacking in vitality and initiative.
Introduction
First, we provide a historical background on the depressive personality. Then, we examine how a depressive personality style can be understood in terms of more basic temperament dimensions, extraversion/positive emotionality, and neuroticism/negative emotionality.
Depressivity
The origins of a depressive personality style can be traced as far back as antiquity. Hippocrates, and later Galen, attributed the clinical state of melancholia to an excess of black bile, whereas a lesser and more stable imbalance of the four humors, predominated by black bile, undergird a melancholic disposition characterized by fear and sadness (Maher and Maher 1994). The first clinical conceptualizations of a depressive personality style emerged when the classical...
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Kessel, E.M., Goldstein, B.L. (2016). Depressivity. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1063-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1063-1
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