Week 12

Question 1

humanist psychology

Answer 1

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

Question 2

positive psychology

Answer 2

• 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?”

Question 3

self-actualization

Answer 3

• underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities
• ever-fuller realization of one’s talents, capacities, and potentialities

Question 4

two fundamental directions that characterize self-actualization as a process

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs

Answer 5

• physiological needs
• safety and security needs
• love and belongingness needs
• esteem needs
• self-actualization needs

Question 6

three themes about the nature of human needs

Answer 6

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

Question 7

deficiency versus growth needs

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

behaviours for encouraging growth

Answer 8

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

Question 9

process of self-actualization

Answer 9

• the organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing self

Question 10

organismic valuing process

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

emergence of the self

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

conditions of worth

Answer 12

• 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

Question 13

conditional regard as a socialization strategy

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

congruence and the fully functional individual

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

how relationships support the actualization tendency

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

problem of evil

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

humanistic motivational phenomena

Answer 17

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

Question 18

criticisms of the humanistic approach

Answer 18

• 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

Question 19

positive psychology

Answer 19

• 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)

Question 20

two-dimensional representation of human strengths

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

happiness and well-being

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

eudaimonic well-being

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

four happiness exercises

Answer 23

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