Aaron Joshua Rosanoff was a Russian-American psychiatrist who studied psychosis

Psychosis

Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...

 and was closely associated with Eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

 Record Office and a member of the Eugenics Research Association.

Born in Russia, Rosanoff emigrated to the United States in 1891 and received an MD from Cornell in 1900. He worked as a physician at Kings Park Hospital from 1901 until 1922. From 1922 until his death in 1943, Rosanoff was a psychiatrist for the L.A. Diagnostic Clinic, and was California's State Director of Institutions and State Commissioner of Lunacy in 1933.

Closely associated with Eugenics Record Office and a member of the Eugenics Research Association, Rosanoff was a member of the American Eugenics Society

American Eugenics Society

The American Eugenics Society was a society established in 1922 to promote eugenics in the United States.It was the result of the Second International Conference on Eugenics . The founders included Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Irving Fisher, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Henry Crampton...

 Advisory council from 1923 to 1935. He was also a member of the editorial Board of the American Journal of Psychiatry

American Journal of Psychiatry

The American Journal of Psychiatry is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering all aspects of psychiatry and the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association. The first volume was issued in 1844, at which time it was known as the American Journal of Insanity...

. In 1905 he translated Manual of Psychiatry by Joseph Rogues de Fursac, a medical school textbook which went through several editions and from 1927 appeared only under Rosanoff's name.

Rosanoff studied both the physiological and genetic factors that lead to various psychosis, and is best known for his Theory of Personality, which broke down the human personality into seven scales: Normal, Hysteroid

Hysteria

Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. People who are "hysterical" often lose self-control due to an overwhelming fear that may be caused by multiple events in one's past that involved some sort of severe conflict; the fear can be centered on a body part, or,...

, Manic

Mania

Mania, the presence of which is a criterion for certain psychiatric diagnoses, is a state of abnormally elevated or irritable mood, arousal, and/ or energy levels. In a sense, it is the opposite of depression...

, Depressive, Autistic, Paranoid

Paranoia

Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...

, and Epileptoid

Epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...

. These scales first modelled in the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale personality test in 1935.