What are examples of characteristics of someone with a Type A personality?
- tend to multitask.
- be competitive.
- have a lot of ambition.
- be very organized.
- dislike wasting time.
- feel impatient or irritated when delayed.
- spend much of your time focused on work.
- be highly focused on your goals.
Terms in this set (8)
Type A Characteristics. - time pressured, want to multitask, impatient, clock watcher. - competitive, need to win, don't feel achievement without product to show for it. - self critical and angry towards others.
Type A and type B are two main personality categories. People with type A personalities may be ambitious, competitive, and aggressive. People with type B personalities may be patient, flexible, and laid-back. Personality refers to the pattern of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors that make each individual who they are.
The hypothesis describes Type A individuals as outgoing, ambitious, rigidly organized, highly status-conscious, impatient, anxious, proactive, and concerned with time management. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving "workaholics".
This test assesses whether you possess the hallmark behavioral characteristics of the Type A Personality. These include hostility, impatience, difficulty expressing emotions, competitiveness, drive, perfectionism and an unhealthy dependence on external rewards such as wealth, status, or power.
Type A behavior is defined in terms of an extreme sense of time urgency, impatience, competitiveness, and aggression/hostility.
Type-A: An ambitious and competitive personality, according to one type theory. Type-B: A laid-back and relaxed personality, according to one type theory. PEN model: Trait theory that focuses on placing people on a continuum for each of three personality traits: psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism.
- Competitive. - Angry and hostile. - Working against the clock. - Doing several things at once.
Type A women tend to show greater autonomic arousal to laboratory stressors as well as greater time urgency and speed, more goal directedness, a preference to work alone under stress conditions, and more competitiveness/aggressiveness than Type B women.
Type A personalities are typically driven, ambitious, successful, and may even live longer. But, they are also more stressed and prone to depression, anxiety, and relationship problems. Type A personalities can try to be happier by practicing more patience with themselves and others.
Where does Type A personality come from?
Because while many people now use the term Type A as a badge of honor, the two men were cardiologists, and they invented the term Type A to describe stressed patients who were at a higher risk of heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular conditions. So why did this medical term become a cultural mainstay?
The type A behavior pattern was originally described by cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman in the 1950s as a behavior pattern characterized by agitation, hostility, rapid speech, and an extremely competitive nature.

While many personality traits, such as extroversion, are innate, most researchers believe that Type A personality characteristics are more of a reaction to environmental factors, or tendencies toward certain behaviors, and are influenced by situations, including culture and job structure.