Type A Personality Test: See Your Time Urgency and Competitive Drive Score
This Type A personality test explores time urgency, competitive striving, and irritability through original questions informed by classic research. Get an instant self-assessment result and a component breakdown.
Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW 
Type A Personality Test is a free, confidential 16-question self-assessment, informed by classic Type A behavior research. It takes about 7 minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and gives you a plain-language score across 4 interpretation bands plus an optional in-depth report. It is an educational screening, not a diagnosis.
Type A is a pattern with three parts, and they matter differently
Type A describes a behavior pattern involving time urgency, competitive striving, and irritability. This Type A personality test explores how those habits show up in daily life. The components deserve separate attention because your ambition, your sense of pressure, and your reactions to frustration may differ.
Time urgency
The feeling of racing the clock: impatience, hurrying others along, doing several things at once, and finding it hard to wait, slow down, or do nothing.
Achievement striving
The competitive, hard-driving side: setting demanding standards, measuring yourself against others, and tying your sense of worth to output. Research links this part to accomplishment more than to illness.
Hostility & irritability
Being easily annoyed, quick to frustration with people who move or think slowly, and prone to irritation in everyday friction. In modern research this is the component most consistently associated with health risk.
| Feature | Typical free quiz | Psychology.com |
|---|---|---|
| Separates the three Type A components | Rarely | Yes, scored separately |
| Grounded in the original research literature | Sometimes | Yes, cited |
| Honest about being an adaptation | No | Yes, clearly labeled |
| Notes which component carries health risk | No | Yes, hostility flagged |
| Clinician-reviewed interpretation | Rarely | Yes, clinician reviewed |
| Optional in-depth personalized report | No | Yes, written to your exact scores |
| Confidential (no data sent) | Often tracked | Runs in your browser |
How scoring works
Answers are scored 0–64 in total. Your result falls into one of 4 bands:
| Score | Band | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| 0–15 | Strong Type B lean | Your responses suggest a clear Type B pattern: a relaxed relationship with time, competition, and frustration. That is an easy pattern on the body and on the people around you. |
| 16–31 | Balanced pattern | Your responses suggest a balanced mix: some drive and urgency, but not a dominant Type A pattern. Most people land somewhere in this range. |
| 32–47 | Type A leaning | Your responses show a meaningful Type A lean. The drive likely serves you in places, and it likely costs you in others. This is a good moment to look at which is which. |
| 48–64 | Strong Type A pattern | Your responses show a strong Type A pattern across the components. Running at this intensity usually produces results, and it usually collects a toll. Both things are true. |
Who this pattern shows up for
This Type A personality test helps you reflect on everyday habits without assigning a permanent personality category. Type A traits often surface most clearly at work, especially in fast-paced, competitive, or high-responsibility roles where the clock and the scoreboard are always visible. People who score high here sometimes also score high on the Perfectionism Test or the Burnout Test, since demanding standards and constant urgency both draw down the same reserves. If the hostility component is your biggest driver, the Anger Issues Test looks specifically at how frustration shows up and what it costs you, in more detail than this screener covers.
Type A is also not fixed to any one job or life stage. Parents, students facing exams, caregivers, and people building a business can all show the same hurried, competitive, easily irritated pattern, just triggered by different pressures. What ties these situations together is less the situation itself than how automatically the mind reaches for urgency and comparison.
Everyday ways to loosen the pattern
Small, concrete changes tend to work better than trying to become a different person overnight. The Time Management tool can help you build in the buffers and single-tasking that ease time urgency without requiring you to do less. For the irritability component, an Anger Log makes the trigger-to-reaction gap visible, which is usually the first step in lengthening it.
You can work on hurried or hostile reactions while keeping goals that matter to you. Consider whether the way you pursue achievement leaves room for sleep, relationships, and recovery after demanding work. This questionnaire cannot establish that any component is medically safe or harmful for you. A therapist can help you examine those patterns, and the Psychology.com therapist directory is a place to find someone who works with stress and anger.
For a practical starting point, describe a recent moment when you snapped or felt rushed. Note what you assumed, what you did, and what you might say differently. The American Psychological Association recommends approaches such as relaxation, reconsidering exaggerated thoughts, and calmer communication for managing anger. If you pause a difficult conversation to cool down, agree to return to it.
Make a practice goal observable: 'When a colleague speaks, I will let them finish before I respond' is easier to review than 'I will stop being Type A.' Afterward, consider whether you followed through and what made it difficult. If workload or caregiving demands leave little room to pause, include those constraints when discussing changes with a therapist. The result should not make you solely responsible for pressures you cannot control.
How accurate is this Type A personality test?
This is an original educational questionnaire informed by classic Type A research. Its result bands have not been validated as clinical cutoffs, and a high score cannot estimate your likelihood of heart disease. Studies of anger and hostility describe associations in groups; they do not turn this online result into an individual medical risk assessment.
Your answers also depend on how you interpret the statements and which situations you have in mind. Use the breakdown to identify examples you want to understand, rather than treating the total as a fixed identity. If you want to explore a related concern, the tests hub includes the sibling self-assessments mentioned above. A health professional can assess medical concerns using your health history and appropriate examinations.
The component totals have different possible maximums because they contain different numbers of statements. A larger raw time-urgency total does not automatically mean that urgency is more prominent than irritability. Compare each total with its own possible maximum, then review the specific habits you endorsed. These comparisons describe your answers; they are not percentiles or rankings against other people.
Methodology & sources
The Type A behavior pattern was first described by cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman (1959), who noticed a cluster of time urgency, competitiveness, and easily triggered hostility in their cardiac patients. Later work, including the Framingham Type A Scale used in the Framingham Heart Study (Haynes et al., 1980), turned the pattern into self-report questionnaires. The best-known measure, the Jenkins Activity Survey, is a proprietary, copyrighted instrument, so this screener does not reproduce it. Instead it is an honest educational adaptation: 16 original agreement statements written to reflect the three components the research literature describes, scored 0 to 4 each.
A higher total reflects a stronger Type A lean, with the full range from 0 to 64 divided into four broad bands. The interpretation deliberately follows where the science landed rather than the original all-or-nothing picture: achievement striving is linked to performance and is not itself a health problem, time urgency is uncomfortable but changeable, and hostility is the component meta-analyses tie most clearly to cardiovascular risk. This is a tool for self-reflection, not a validated clinical instrument and not a diagnosis of any kind.
The original statements and educational bands on this page have not undergone their own validation study. Research findings for the Framingham scale or Jenkins Activity Survey cannot be transferred to this questionnaire simply because the topics overlap. The component breakdown summarizes your responses and does not establish separate diagnoses, performance predictions, or cardiovascular risk estimates.
References
- Friedman M, Rosenman RH. Association of specific overt behavior pattern with blood and cardiovascular findings. JAMA. 1959;169(12):1286-1296. doi.org/10.1001/jama.1959.03000290012005
- Haynes SG, Feinleib M, Kannel WB. The relationship of psychosocial factors to coronary heart disease in the Framingham Study. III. Eight-year incidence of coronary heart disease. Am J Epidemiol. 1980;111(1):37-58. doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.aje.a112873
- Chida Y, Steptoe A. The association of anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease: a meta-analytic review of prospective evidence. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2009;53(11):936-946. doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2008.11.044
- Jenkins CD, Zyzanski SJ, Rosenman RH. Progress toward validation of a computer-scored test for the type A coronary-prone behavior pattern. Psychosom Med. 1971;33(3):193-202. doi.org/10.1097/00006842-197105000-00001
- American Psychological Association. Strategies for controlling your anger: Keeping anger in check. apa.org/topics/strategies-controlling-anger
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, September 16). Type A Personality Test. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tests/type-a-personality
Type A Personality Test FAQ
What is a Type A personality?
Type A describes a behavior pattern first observed by cardiologists in the 1950s: a strong sense of time urgency, a competitive and hard-driving approach to work, and a tendency toward irritability and hostility. It is a pattern of behavior, not a mental-health condition, and most people show some of its traits some of the time.
Is this the Jenkins Activity Survey?
No. The Jenkins Activity Survey is a proprietary, copyrighted instrument, so we cannot reproduce it. This screener is an honest educational adaptation built on the same research tradition, including the Friedman and Rosenman work and the Framingham Type A Scale. It is for reflection, not a validated clinical score.
Is being Type A bad for your health?
Research has associated anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease, but this questionnaire cannot estimate your personal risk. A Type A result is a description of reported habits, not a medical finding. Look at which reactions affect your daily life, and discuss physical symptoms or cardiovascular concerns with a clinician regardless of whether your score is high or low.
Is Type B better than Type A?
Neither label ranks your worth, ability, or health. Type B usually describes a more relaxed approach to time and competition, while Type A describes more urgency and drive. People can behave differently across situations. The useful question is whether your habits support your goals and relationships or leave you persistently tense, exhausted, or irritable.
Can a Type A pattern change?
Habits such as rushing, interrupting, and reacting angrily can be worked on. Start with a specific situation and practice a different response, such as pausing before answering or communicating a need calmly. A therapist can help you understand recurring triggers and rehearse alternatives. Progress varies, and this self-assessment cannot predict how quickly a pattern will change.
Is the test really confidential?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser. Your individual answers are scored in your browser and are never sent to us or linked to you. They stay in this tab so you can return to your result, and closing or clearing the tab clears them. If you ask us to email the PDF, we receive your summary scores with your email address, never your individual answers. No account is needed.
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