Week 12 Flashcards
humanist psychology
A human being is best understood as an integrated, organized whole rather than as a series of differentiated parts
- top-down approach to motivation (master motives)
- strivings toward growth and self-realization, and away from facade, self-concealment, and the pleasing of others
positive psychology
- emerging field of psychology that seeks to articulate the vision of the good life and uses the empirical methods of psychology to understand what make life worth living
- its subject matter is the investigation of positive subjective experiences (ex: happiness, well-being, optimism, resilience)
- it looks at a person and asks “what could be?”
self-actualization
- underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities
- ever-fuller realization of one’s talents, capacities, and potentialities
two fundamental directions that characterize self-actualization as a process
1) autonomy
- moving away from heteronomy and toward an ever-increasing capacity to depend on one’s self and to regulate one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours so to move toward greater self-realization
2) openness
- receiving information such that it is neither repressed, ignored, or filtered, nor distorted by wishes, fears, or past experiences
Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs
- physiological needs
- safety and security needs
- love and belongingness needs
- esteem needs
- self-actualization needs
three themes about the nature of human needs
1) needs arrange themselves in the hierarchy according to potency or strength; lower need, stronger and more urgently it is felt
2) lower the need is in the hierarchy, the sooner it appears in development; young people experience only lower needs, while older people are more likely to experience the full range
deficiency versus growth needs
- dual-level hierarchy of deficiency and growth needs (rejection of the five-level hierarchy)
- collapse of the physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem needs into the category of deficiency needs
- self-actualization is a growth need
behaviours for encouraging growth
1) make growth choices
- progression-growth choice is a movement toward self-actualization
2) be honest
- taking responsibility for one’s choices and the consequences of these choices
- honest with who you are
3) situationally position yourself for peak experience
- set up conditions to make peak experiences more likely
4) give up defensiveness
- identify defenses and find the courage to give them up
5) let the self emerge
- listen to that inner voice, rather than to others
6) be open to experience
- experience with full concentration and total absorption
process of self-actualization
- the organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing self
organismic valuing process
- present at birth
- an inherent capacity to judge for oneself whether a specific experience promotes or reverses growth (i.e., what is important and essential for a more fulfilling life
- experiential feed-forward system that allows one to coordinate life experiences with the actualization tendency
emergence of the self
- happens soon after birth
- awareness of being, an awareness of experience, and an awareness of one’s own functioning
- actualizing tendency begins to express itself in part toward the self
- prompts the emergence of the need for positive regard - approval, acceptance, and love from others
conditions of worth
- happens because of experienced
- internalization of parental conditions of worth, and eventually of societal conditions of worth, into the self-structure
- unconditional versus conditional positive regard
conditional regard as a socialization strategy
- offering of parental love for child obedience and the withdrawal of parental love for child disobedience
- positive conditional regard = taking in feelings of internal compulsion (ex. perfectionism)
- negative conditional regard = generates resentment and worry (ex. anger, anxiety), and may lead to amotivation
congruence and the fully functional individual
- caused by consequences
- the extent to which the individual denies and rejects (incongruence) or accepts (congruence) the full range of their personal characteristics, abilities, desires, and beliefs
how relationships support the actualization tendency
- the extent to which individuals develop toward congruence and adjustment depends greatly on the quality of their interpersonal relationships
- helping others
- relatedness to others
- freedom to learn
- self-definition and social definition
problem of evil
- assumtion that human anture is inherently good - - is that really the case?
- evil develops as follows:
- adults shame and scorn the child; sees themselves as flawed and incompetent
- the child incubates a negative self-view; comes to prefer lies and self-deceit over critical self-examination
- transition from a victime to an insensitive predator
- person initiates experimental malevolence
- malevolence personality is forged through a rigid refusal to engage in critical self-examination
humanistic motivational phenomena
1) causality orientations: people vary in their understanding of what causes and what regulates their behaviour
- autonomy causality orientation: reliance on inner guides
- control causality orientation: reliance on social guides and environmental incentives
2) validation-seeking versus growth-seeking
- related to the general goal orientation of the individual
- valuing oneself via social conditions of worth leads people into processes of validation-seeking (e.g., needing the approval of others in order to feel good about oneself)
- growth-seeking individuals center their personal strivings around learning, improving, and reaching personal potential
criticisms of the humanistic approach
- emphasizes only one part of human nature
- uses a number of vague and ill-defined constructs
- how one is to know what is really wanted or what is really needed by the actualizing tendency
positive psychology
- fundamental assertion is that good mental health requires more than the absence of mental illness
- encourages flourishing: high levels of emotional, psychological, and social well-being that grows out of continuous self-growth, high quality relationships, and purposive and meaningful life
- the building of human strengths yields to interrelated outcomes: greater personal growth and well-being; lesser human sickness from ever taking roots within the personality (e.g., depression)
two-dimensional representation of human strengths
- focus on self vs. focus on others/heart vs. mind
- implies that people need to make tradeoffs in their pursuit of personal strengths
- implies that strengths associated with the heart (e.g., gratitude, love, hope) tend life toward happiness, while strengths associated with the mind (e.g. open-mindedness, self-regulation, authenticity) tend life toward meaning and achievement
happiness and well-being
- presence of positive emotion and the absence of negative emotion and the cognitive evaluation of how well or how poorly things are going
- subjective well-being
- a process: it comes from doing rather than having
- it is beneficial to effective life functioning: the happier people are the better in their future health, work engagement, and relationship satisfaction
eudaimonic well-being
- experience of seeking-out challenges, exerting effort, being fully engaged and experiencing flow in what one is doing, acting on one’s true values, and feeling fully alive and authentic
- it is more about engagement, meaning and self-realization than it is about happiness
four happiness exercises
1) gratitude visit
- write and deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who has been especially kind to you, but was never really thanked
2) three good things in life
- at the end of each day, write down three things that went well and identify the cause of each
3) you at your best
- write about a time when you functioned at your best
- reflect on the personal resources that made that functioning possible
4) identify signature strengths
- identify up to five personal signature strengths and find a way to use each in a new way
