Ch. 11 Humanism

Question 1

Humanistic Psychology

Answer 1

• “Human”istic meaning study of humans
• Value the human experience and existentialism
• People are basically good
• Humans have an inherent drive toward increasing competence and command (control) over their environment
• Some say drive toward “self-actualization” and growth

Question 2

Carl Rogers

Answer 2

• Best known for his development of client-centered therapy

- Heavily based on his humanistic ideas about the motives of humans

Question 3

Actualizing tendency

Answer 3

• Innate, fundamental characteristic of humans is a striving for wholeness
• We have one basic motive—growth
• Life is an active, ongoing process
• Our experiences (and our interpretations of them) can help or hinder our growth)

Question 4

Unconditional positive regard

Answer 4

• Accepting and loving a person regardless of behavior
• Our feelings of positive regard come from interactions with our parents or close others
• Under conditions of unconditional positive regard, actualizing tendency can flourish
• Person is open to change and is non-defensive (i.e., fully functioning individual)

Question 5

Conditional positive regard

Answer 5

• Positive regard is made contingent upon specific behaviors

- You are worthwhile only if you behave in certain ways

Question 6

Abraham Maslow: Hierarchy of Needs

Answer 6

1. Physiological Needs
2. Safety and Security
3. Love and belonging
4. Self-Esteem
5. Self-Actualization

• Any comprehensive theory of human motivation must take into account the whole person
• Hierarchy of needs
• Needs lower on the hierarchy are strongest and need to be satisfied before higher motives (Deprivation Needs)
• But not completely rigid
• Formulated in 1943

Question 7

Self-Actualization

Answer 7

• Striving for self-actualization is ultimate purpose of behavior
• Only 1% reach self-actualization
• Most likely after 60 years of age
• Seek to solve problems outside themselves and reach for truth, beauty and justice

Some have peak experiences
- A short but intense feeling of awe or ecstasy often accompanied by a sense of fulfillment, insight, and oneness with something larger than one’s self (i.e., self-transcendent)

Question 8

Why failure to self-actualize?

Answer 8

• Tendency toward growth is weaker than the deficiency motives
• Western culture has emphasized the negative nature of human motivation, so we don’t trust our inner nature (think Freud)
• We want to control our motivation and sometimes reject our intuition
• Growth requires the taking of chances
• Stepping away from what is secure and comfortable
• People are afraid of their own abilities—

Question 9

Criticisms of Maslow

Answer 9

• Lacking empirical rigor
• Too western in focus
• Elitist
  People confined by poor education, dead-end jobs, or societal expectations are unlikely to become self-actualized
• If only 1% become self-actualized, then is a motivation toward growth really as general as Maslow proposed?

Question 10

Kenrick and colleagues’ (2010) revision of Maslow’s hierarchy

Answer 10

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Question 11

Human agency

Answer 11

• The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life is the essence of humanness

Humans are active, rather than reactive organism and our behavior is shaped by internal and external features

Question 12

Reciprocal Determinism/Causation

Answer 12

• Our behavior, environment, and personal factors (such as cognitive, affective, and biological events) influence and are influenced by one another as depicted in the triangle on the next slide

Question 13

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory: Intentionality

Answer 13

• A proactive commitment to bring about a future course of action

Question 14

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory: Forethought

Answer 14

• Anticipate future events and their likely consequences

Question 15

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory: Self-reactiveness

Answer 15

• Motivation and self-regulation necessary to maintain a course of action and to evaluate it with respect to our goal standards

Question 16

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory: Self-reflectiveness:

Answer 16

• The ability to evaluate how effective we are at exercising our capacity for human agency

Question 17

Self-efficacy

Answer 17

• Self-efficacy predicts how we feel about ourselves, what types of challenges we will seek out (or avoid), whether we feel optimistic or pessimistic about future events, etc.
• Domain specific
• Can be seen as our sense of competence
• People who have greater self-efficacy have positive outcomes in school, work, relationships, and health

Question 18

Self-Determination Theory

Answer 18

• Human beings can be proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function
• People have inherent growth tendencies that can be either supported or stifled by the environment (their social context)
• People have innate psychological needs that can be fostered through motivated activities and supportive environments
• Even extrinsically motivated activities can behave like intrinsically motivated activities if they support psychological need satisfaction

Question 19

Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness/connectedness

Answer 19

• the feeling that our choices are our own; we are in control of our own actions
• feeling skilled and effective
• feeling connected to close others

Question 20

Intrinsic motivation

Answer 20

• the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one’s capacities, to explore, and to learn, just for the sake of enjoyment. Do the activity just for its own sake—no external rewards or pressures

Question 21

Extrinsic motivation

Answer 21

• The performance of an activity to attain some separable outcome

Question 22

Internalize and Integration

Answer 22

• “taking in” a value or regulation and viewing it as important
• identifying so strongly with the importance of the activity that it becomes part of their sense of self (no longer externally regulated)

Question 23

Positive Psychology

Answer 23

• From our self-reflections, we form evaluations of how successful we are at pursuing the goals we set for ourselves.
• This evaluation is termed self-efficacy

Self-efficacy predicts how we feel about ourselves, what types of challenges we will seek out (or avoid), whether we feel optimistic or pessimistic about future events, etc.

• Domain specific
• Can be seen as our sense of competence
• People who have greater self-efficacy have positive outcomes in school, work, relationships, and health
• Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) state that most of psychology since WWII has focused on treatment of people with mental illness

They call on people to also study healthy development
- Instead of studying how to take people from -5 to o, let’s - - consider how to take people from 0 to +5, to flourishing

Specifically they asked for researchers to study:

• Positive emotions
• Positive individual traits and virtues
• Positive institutions