How glands affect personality

How do glands affect personality? Before any answer can be given to that question, before any discussion of the nature of glands can be undertaken, it is essential to agree upon a working definition of that currently popular but often rather ambiguous word—personality. What, precisely, does it mean?

Alluring advertisements in innumerable gaudy magazines promise, for a relatively small fee, to “develop your personality.” Even the pages of otherwise sedate and classical college catalogues boast of courses in “personality training.” And the term comes up incessantly in everyday conversation. We hear that a woman is beautiful but that she lacks personality; or that a man is not brilliant but that he has a great deal of personality. Such uses of the word undoubtedly fill a descriptive purpose. Most of us know what it means when it is employed in this manner. Yet it may be misleading. It implies that personality is a quality apart from physical and mental traits which some individuals possess to a high degree and in which others are totally deficient.

How can such an elusive attribute be either explained or defined? It cannot be, of course, but then it does not need to be for it is impossible to imagine a person without a personality. Every human being has, of necessity, a personality. It is personality which distinguishes him from some people and causes him to resemble others. And into its make-up goes every trait, physical, mental, emotional and temperamental, which he possesses; his sex, his height, his weight, the size and character of his features, his emotional stability, his mental powers, his special abilities. If these characteristics change to any great extent then his total personality is different.

Some of these traits, of course, seem more important, more ingrained in individuality than others. Sex, for example, appears more essential than weight. A friend often becomes suddenly much stouter or thinner and yet retains the same character. On the other hand, the whole personality of the fat lady of the side show depends on her weight, that of the human skeleton on his weight and height combined, and of the bearded lady on her abnormal growth of hair. To a lesser degree such gross physical traits play an important role in the personalities of more normal individuals. And, speaking very generally, any marked anatomical variation is apt to be accompanied by finer mental and temperamental differences.

In everyday life we casually accept this correlation between physical and mental characteristics. We somehow unthinkingly divide the population into definite physiological types and we more or less expect these physiological types to show certain well marked traits of personality. In cartoons the reformer, the vice-crusader, is always portrayed as a tall, stiff, angular individual with a long, narrow face, a straight nose and tightly pressed lips. Without any accompanying label we would know that such a character was supposed to represent an intolerant, self-opinionated bigot. And without consulting our programs we can usually guess correctly which member of the cast of a musical comedy is the comedian. If there is an exceptionally plump person on the stage it is more than likely that it is he who will have most of the comical lines to repeat, who will be required to take the awkward tumbles and, in general, be responsible for the audience’s laughter. For it is customary to expect fat people to be jolly and amusing. They look as though they should be and we feel disappointed if they turn out to be morose or dignified or too energetic. And in the same way we expect the sinister, dark mustachioed gentleman of the comic strips to be the villain, and the dainty, graceful maiden on the moving picture screen to be the sweet and guileless heroine.

These stock characters are, of course, highly conventionalized, but the convention is a natural, not an artificial one. It is natural to assume that certain physical types will show certain temperamental traits because usually they do. Often, however, they do not run true to form. And the personalities which surprise us by their anomalies are apt to be the ones which pique our curiosity, which arouse our interest and for whose individuality we seek an explanation. Yet it would be just as instructive to find a reason for those who conform to type as for those who differ; to learn why the thin, wiry, dark Frenchman is volatile, quick and romantic, while the more stolidly built Scandinavian is slower, surer, and less excitable. We might, if it were not for the anomalies we have just noted, expect their respective physiques alone to account for their temperamental differences. But we would still have to explain the physiques, themselves. A great deal, of course, could be laid to inheritance. But what, exactly, is inherited? And why was the ancestor from whom the physiognomy was handed down built the way he was? And so we become involved in the whole question of racial differences, and it will be much safer to return once more to individual cases; to see if we can assign any reason not only for the fat man’s plumpness but for his customary good humor, and for the reformer’s thinness as well as his usual sourness of disposition.

For a long time such reasons were largely matters of speculation, but in recent years, particularly since 1889, science has turned its attention to this problem of personality. And its solution seems more and more to lie in an exact knowledge of the glands of internal secretion, or as they are often called, the endocrin glands.