Judging Mind By Body

From time immemorial men have had the idea that people of different body shapes have different temperaments. Despite exceptions, fat people seem in general to be jolly, gregarious, lazy, comfort-loving; thin, wiry or bony people are often secretive, seclusive, introverted;* powerful giants are supposed to be self-assured, mild-mannered and softspoken. Making the maximum possible allowance for environmental conditioning, most biologists insist that there must be some relation left between behavior and physical constitution.

What are the relations between body structure and glands? Between body structure and temperament, insanity, criminal tendencies, immunity and susceptibility to disease, nutritional requirements, sex needs, rate of maturing, length of life? Few years ago a smart, quiet, pleasant young man named William Herbert Sheldon began to think hard about these clouded questions.

A Rhode Islander who had spent some time cowpunching in the West, William Sheldon took his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Chicago. When he became interested in constitutional psychology, he saw that he ought to know a good deal about anatomy and physiology, so he spent three more years getting a medical degree, another year as a hospital intern. From Chicago, from Harvard, where he transferred four years ago, and a few other universities, he collected some 4,000 photographs of freshmen, taken in the nude from the front, side and rear under controlled and uniform conditions so they could be precisely measured and compared. He added some clinically obtained data on women and older men for the sake of perspective.

Dr. Sheldon became convinced of two things:

1) That much brilliant research on glands had been wasted. Since glands are only part of the whole body, Sheldon deemed it more profitable to start with the whole. "Glands," he said, "probably determine personality only in the same sense that the long bones and the short ones, and the gut and the muscles and the skin, and the rest ... of the body determine personality."

2) That previous attempts, including those of famed Ernst Kretschmer of Germany, to sort human physiques had bogged down in a welter of mixed types, subtypes, hybrid types, etc., because individuals would not fit preconceived categories. Sheldon attacked the pigeonholing problem from another angle: that of three structural components or characteristics (of his own devising) body measurements would enable an investigator to determine, for any person, the strength of each component. That strength could be rated numerically on a scale of 1 (almost complete absence) to 7 (almost complete dominance). Then the individual's body type would be a three-digit number showing his quantity of each component--such as 443, 172, 236. There would be no individual who would not "fit."

Dr. Sheldon does not claim that mere body-typing solves the relation of physique to all aspects of temperament. But he does claim that efficient and "meaningful" body-typing lays the groundwork for solving such problems.

Components & Types. In The Varieties of Human Physique (Harper; $4.50), a summary of his work which he published last week, Dr. Sheldon describes and defines his three components. They are called endomorphic, mesomorphic and ectomorphic because the prominent features of each are derived, respectively, from the embryo's endoderm or inner layer (abdominal organs), the mesoderm or middle layer (bones, muscles, connective tissue, heart, blood vessels), and the ectoderm or outer layer (skin, hair, nails, sense organs, nervous system, brain).

The endomorphic component involves roundness and softness of body, central concentration of mass, short neck, small bones, weak, short, tapering limbs, small hands and feet.

The mesomorphic component involves squareness and hardness of body, rugged, conspicuous muscles, large, prominent bones, heavy chest, wrists and hands, broad shoulders, broad hips, powerful pelvis.

The ectomorphic component involves fragility and delicacy of body, spindly bones, stringy muscles, dropped shoulders, prominent ribs, long, thin, forward-bent neck, small face, sharp nose, thin, dry, sensitive skin, fine, quick-growing hair, prominent genitalia.

Endomorphy gets the first digit in the type number, mesomorphy the second, ectomorphy the third. The extreme endomorph is a 711, the extreme mesomorph a 171, the extreme ectomorph a 117.

But these extremes account for only a little over 1% of the sample studied. Much more common are two types in which the three components are well balanced, the 4433 and 4445. Such people are sleek, says Author Sheldon. "They groom well, they are relaxed, they are well filled out all over, their hair combs easily and lies smoothly, they have rosy color and good complexion . .. easy carriage ... smooth walk . . . soft pleasing skin."

Other types of interest:

"The 236 is a slender, upright physique, usually tall and [sometimes] has a symmetry and beauty of proportion that is aesthetically of the highest order." Dr. Sheldon found that many famous paintings of Jesus Christ represented Him as a 236 or a 235.

"The 172 is probably the masculine ideal which . . . carries supreme strength and masculine ruggedness. . . ." Those heroes of the comic strips, Tarzan, Superman and Li'l Abner, are 1728.

Utility. Dr. Sheldon declares that though people may put on or lose weight as they grow older, their basic physique types do not change. Thus weight tables which give "normal weights" against height and age, without regard to structural type, mean less than nothing. Example: A heavy woman of type 632 frets because she thinks she is 30 Ib. overweight, whereas she is actually 30 Ib. underweight for her type and ought to stop dieting at once.

Future investigation may show that different physical types have different nutritional requirements. It is a commonplace that fat endomorphic people usually like sweet and starch foods--carbohydrates. Sheldon thinks it may turn out that a high carbohydrate diet is just what such people need.

A woman of type 442 is one of nature's practical jokes. In youth she is generally an active, slender pep girl with the endomorphic 4 concealed. After maturity that component blossoms out and she gets chubby. Sometimes a girl of this type, in her streamlined adolescence, chooses a career as a dancer. It might save years of wasted effort if she could be dissuaded by constitutional diagnosis and prediction of her future dimensions.

Temperament. As in physique, Sheldon also finds three components of temperament: viscerotonic, somatotonic, cerebrotonic. The extreme viscerotonic "radiates comfort. He participates easily in social gatherings and makes people feel at home. . . . His joys and sorrows he communicates to others."

The extreme somatotonic is "an active, energetic person . . . addicted to exercise and relatively immune to fatigue. He walks assertively, talks noisily, behaves aggressively. . . ." In youth he looks older than he is. "He is concerned mostly with affairs of the moment and meets his problems with some form of activity."

The extreme cerebrotonic is introverted, inhibited, unable to "let go" easily. He is likely to have allergies, skin trouble, chronic fatigue, insomnia. "He is sensitive to noise and distractions. He is not at home in social gatherings and he shrinks from crowds. He meets his troubles by seeking solitude."

These three components are mixed in various proportions in different people, and they seem to correlate, roughly but by no means exactly, with the endomorphic, mesomorphic and ectomorphic physical components, in that order. The nature and degree of the correspondence, and its interplay with environmental factors, says Sheldon, are questions for the future.

It seems likely that the amount of any one physical component, singly considered, is far less important to temperament than are balances and ratios among all three. For example, the body types 514 and 541 both have the same amount of endomorphic roundness, but the other two components, the strong and the frail, are reversed. So the 514 is a "long-legged, round-shouldered, completely soft and effeminate boy," whereas the 541 is a "ruddy, powerful, active, barrel-bodied boy who is usually full of bounding energy and is likely to become president of something."

*Caesar distrusted Cassius because he had a "lean and hungry look."

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