Brief report The French version of the validated short TEMPS-A: The temperament evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego Marie-Odile Krebs a , M. Kazes a , Jean-Pierre Olié a , Henri Loo a , Kareen Akiskal b , Hagop Akiskal b, ⁎ a INSERM U796, Université Paris Descartes, Sainte Anne Hospital, Paris, France b International Mood Center, La Jolla, CA, USA Accepted 1 November 2006 Abstract The TEMPS developed from classical temperament concepts at the Universities of Tennessee (Memphis) and California (San Diego) in collaboration with clinical scientists in Pisa and Paris. It presently exists in 20 languages and full validation of its 110- item version has been accomplished in American English, Italian, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Turkish, Lebanese Arabic and Argentinean Spanish. For many studies, a shorter version is easier to use. Accordingly, the 39-item validated English version has just been rendered into French, to facilitate clinical use and research in Francophone countries. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Temperament; Psychometrics; Affective disorders; TEMPS-A The concept of affective temperaments goes back to at least Greek psychological medicine. The concept was re- introduced into psychiatry by German psychiatrists (Kraepelin, 1899 tr; Kretschmer, 1936 tr). When the last author worked in the Memphis Mood Clinic in the 1970s, he found that these concepts were more useful in practice in dealing with affectively ill patients than the personality disorder concepts of DSM-II (American Psychiatric Association, 1966). Interestingly, Kurt Schneider (1958) who wrote a masterpiece on psycho- pathic personalities, did not believe that his descriptions of depressive, labile and hyperthymic temperaments had any relationship to the cyclothymic group of disorders of Kraepelin's manic-depressive illness (1921 tr). The observations in Memphis led to the operationalization of cyclothymic, depressive, irritable and hyperthymic types (Akiskal et al., 1979). In the present special issue dedicated to the contributions of French psychiatry to world psychiatry (Akiskal, 2006-this issue), van Valk- enberg et al. (2006) have actually shown that the theoretical positions of Kretschmer (1936 tr) and Falret (1854) are more supported by current data than those of Kurt Schneider (1958). Nonetheless, Schneider's descriptions are rather compelling and have contributed to the elaboration of temperament types in what eventually became known as the Temperament Evalu- ation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego, the TEMPS-A (Akiskal et al., 2005a,b). Journal of Affective Disorders 96 (2006) 271 – 273 www.elsevier.com/locate/jad ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: krebs@broca.inserm.fr (Marie-Odile Krebs), hakiskal@ucsd.edu (H. Akiskal). 0165-0327/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2006.11.001