According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Type A personalities are characterised by ambition, impatience, and competitiveness, and thought to be susceptible to stress and heart disease. (Type B, meanwhile, is defined by being relaxed, patient and having behaviour that could decrease a risk of heart disease.)

　　根据牛津英语词典(OED)，A型行为者的特征是有高度进取心和紧迫感，性情急躁，据说容易感受压力，易患冠心病。(与之相对，B型行为者的特征是做人悠闲轻松，无紧迫感，不易患有冠心病。)

　　A pair of American cardiologists came up with the term in the 1950s to describe white middle-class men who had certain personality traits that made them more susceptible to coronary heart problems. (One report in 2012 in the American Journal of Public Health asserted that the research was heavily bankrolled by the cigarette industry to avoid any claims that smoking is bad for you.)

　　“A型行为者”系20世纪50年代美国心脏病学家弗里德曼和罗森曼发明的术语，用来指具有易引发冠心病的某类性格特点的中产白人男性。(2012年《美国公共卫生杂志》中一份报告断言，该研究受到烟草业的大力资助，使其避免提出吸烟有害健康的主张。)

　　In the decades since, the term has entered the popular lexicon and people have used it as a way to place themselves into one camp or another. This binary aspect of personality – that you’re naturally either Type A or Type B – was the main finding of a 1989 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

　　自此以后的数十年里，这一用词成为流行术语，人们以此为自己的性格划分阵营。1989年《人格与社会心理学杂志》发表一份研究，其中的重大发现是人格的二分性——即你天生不是A型行为者，就是B型行为者，二者必居其一。

　　But University of Toronto postdoctoral student Michael Wilmot wanted to test if these assumptions are still accurate today. So he and his team decided to replicate older studies and update them with more modern survey methods to see if they would produce the same results. Their findings are due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

　　而多伦多大学博士后学生威尔莫特希望验证这些假设置于今天是否依然准确。因此他和他的团队重做以往的实验，运用更现代的调查方法，看看是否会得出相同的结论。他们的研究结果将发表于《人格与社会心理学杂志》。

　　The team re-examined archival data from previous surveys of nearly 4,500 people across the US and UK, whom had participated in old Type A surveys years ago. They were unable to achieve similar results that suggested “Type A” is a naturally occurring personality type, and found that personality is better understood as sliding scales of specific traits rather than categories.

　　威尔莫特研究团队重新考察了英美若干年前的调查档案数据，其中近4500人参与过传统的A型行为者调查。但他们并没有得出“A型行为”是一种天生的性格种类这样的结论。他们的最新研究发现，人的个性特点是因人而异，而不能简单归纳到某个固定种类。/

　　“People love the idea of categories,” Wilmot says. “Science helps us make sense of the world, and people are the most interesting thing to other people, so it helps to have categories.”

　　威尔莫特说，“人类喜欢分门别类的概念。科学用这种方法帮助我们了解世界，人类最感兴趣的便是人类同胞，因此也就给人类划分类别。”