Dr. Edward Golden, in the 1950's and 1960's, was among the first human services professionals to adopt personality surveys like the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and Cattel's 16PF. Dr. Golden went on to found the Association for Psychological Type (APT) in 1979 and was posthumously awarded the prestigious Mary McCaulley Award for Outstanding Achievement and Contribution toward the field of Psychological Type in 1995 by APT after his untimely death in April of that year.

Origin of the Personality Sphere

The concept of the Personality Sphere was given to the developers of the Golden Personality Type Profiler in 1990 by David Saunders, Ph.D. The Personality Sphere was created to represent how Personality could be visualized in three dimensional space. Dr. Saunders used the concept to communicate his ideas to Isabel Myers, who was in the process of developing what was then known as the Briggs-Myers Type Indicator.

The inspiration for the sphere might well belong to one of the first mathematical psychologists, L.L. Thurstone, who is credited as the first to find statistical evidence for the "Five Factor Model" or "Big 5" theory of Personality. In his classic book, Vectors of the Mind (1934), Thurstone developed his description of personality with the aid of a three-dimensional sphere on which each trait was represented as a point on its surface. Two positively correlated traits were placed next to each other while two negatively correlated traits were placed on the opposite side of the sphere. Independent traits were displayed at ninety degree angles. The correlation for each pair of traits agrees with the cosines of the central angles. As a whole, each trait could be described in terms of its coordinates on the sphere and its relationship to the other traits.