8 The Third Force: the Humanists - Maslow and Rogers

Question 1

What determines the health of an individual in the Humanistic Psychology model of determinism?

Answer 1

The individual’s health is determined by their choices. The individual is an active determiner in their own fate rather than a passive recipient determined by instincts or the environment

Question 2

How does personality develop, according to Humanists?

Answer 2

Humanists argue that an individual’s personality develops by pulling towards goals, rather than being pushed by instinctual drives

Question 3

Birth/death dates of Abraham Maslow, por favor?

Answer 3

1908-1970

Question 4

With whom did Maslow study?

Answer 4

With Thorndike and did PhD with Harlow (of monkey fame), who said “we lost one of the best scholars of behaviourism”

Question 5

Did Maslow become president of the APA?

Answer 5

You betcha hierarchy of needs he did!

Question 6

When did Maslow first put forward the idea of a hierarchy of needs?

Answer 6

In his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review

Question 7

What’s the difference between deficit and growth needs, soglasno Maslovu?

Answer 7

Deficit needs are for things such as safety, food etc. If you have a deficit you are motivated to achieving that need – deficit needs cease to be motivating once they have been satisfied.

Growth needs include things such as self actualisation (need for fulfilment of potential) and need for truth/justice

Question 8

What are the six levels of the hierarchy of needs - from top to bottom?

Answer 8

6. B-values – need for truth
7. Self-actualisation – need for fulfilment of potential
8. Esteem – for oneself and for others
9. Love/belongingness –need for family/mateship
10. Safety – need for shelter/peace
11. Physiological – need for food and water

Question 9

How many people finish the journey to self-actualisation?

Answer 9

Few

Question 10

Must a need be satisfied in order for a higher-level need to emerge?

Answer 10

Yes, but not entirely. The more a lower-level need is satisfied, the more a higher-level need will emerge

Question 11

Can the hierarchy ever be reversed?

Answer 11

Sure, take the struggling artist, for instance, whose need to fulfill his potential takes precedence over need for food

Question 12

What happens if the needs are not fulfilled?

Answer 12

Lack of satisfaction of any level of needs leads to pathology; satisfaction of them leads to psychological health

Question 13

How does Maslow define self-actualisation?

Answer 13

“The full use and exploitation of talents, capacities potentialities, etc”

Question 14

What happens if psychological growth is stunted at level of esteem?

Answer 14

You don’t develop self-actualisation or B-needs

Question 15

How many self-actualised people did Maslow find in his study of 3,000 college students?

Answer 15

1

Question 16

What are some examples of self-actualised people?

Answer 16

Lincoln, Gandhi, Einstein, Jefferson

Question 17

What are some of the 15 characteristics of self-actualised people?

Answer 17

1. More efficient perception of reality
2. Autonomy
3. Democratic character structure
4. Acceptance of self, others and nature
5. Continued freshness of appreciation
6. Discrimination between means and ends
7. Spontaneity, simplicity and naturalness
8. The peak experience* - feeling of transcendence that occurs at unexpected and quite ordinary moments
9. Philosophical sense of humour
10. Problem-centered (concerned with problems outside themselves)
11. Social interest in the community
12. Creativeness
13. Need for privacy
14. Profound interpersonal relations
15. Resistance to enculturation

Question 18

What is measured by the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) and its later revision the Short Index POI (SIPOI)?

Answer 18

Self-actualisation.

Question 19

How was the discriminant validity of the Personal Orientation Inventory established?

Answer 19

Fogarty (1994) used the POI to successfully show that students who were perceived to be more self-actualised reported significantly higher scores than students perceived to be less self-actualised - thus providing discriminant validity for the POI (and indirect support for Maslow’s theory.)

Question 20

What three important emendations to Maslow’s hierarchy were proposed by Rowan (1998)?

Answer 20

1. A clearer distinction between the need for esteem from others and the need for “self-esteem”;
2. Include the “need for competence” between the safety needs and the need for love/belongingness; and
3. Eradicate the popular, yet inaccurate, textbook presentation of the needs hierarchy in the form of a triangle or pyramid.

Question 21

Are people’s basic needs always satisfied (in polite society)?

Answer 21

Nah, they’re always partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied

Question 22

What does it mean when someone has 75% of their physical needs met?

Answer 22

Who knows? The hierarchy of needs is kinda hard to measure

Question 23

What are some problems with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

Answer 23

The categories are arbitrary
There’s no obvious way of measuring it
It’s not empirically refutable

Question 24

Birth/death dates of Carl Rogers?

Answer 24

1902-1987

Question 25

What does Roger’s have to say about the individual’s experience?

Answer 25

“The individual’s experience is his or her reality”

Question 26

What is it the therapist’s job to assess, according to Rogers?

Answer 26

The individual’s private world, their version of reality. So what the client says is more important than what the therapist thinks of them.

Question 27

What is Rogers’ seminal publication?

Answer 27

Client-Centred Therapy

Question 28

What is Rogers’ basic theory called?

Answer 28

Person-Centred Theory (but Client-Centred Therapy)

Question 29

How does Rogers’ justify his non-interventionist approach to therapy?

Answer 29

With the idea that the individual has within himself the resources for healing himself, and these resources can be tapped only in an accepting psychological environment

Question 30

What are the six conditions of personality change in Client-Centred Therapy?

Answer 30

1. Two persons, the client and the therapist, are in psychological contact.
2. The client is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.
3. The therapist is congruent and genuine.
4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard (warm acceptance) for the client.
5. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference and endeavours to communicate this experience to the client (e.g. circular questioning).
6. The communication to the client of the therapist’s empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard must be minimally achieved.

Question 31

What is incongruence?

Answer 31

Conflict between ideal (or believed-to-be-true) self and actual self

Question 32

What is the technique of circular questioning and what does it do?

Answer 32

Client: “I’m not feeling well”
Therapist: “So you’re not feeling well?”
It communicates empathic understanding.

Question 33

Rogers: Why shouldn’t the therapist make suggestions as to what the client should do?

Answer 33

Because the client has within them the answer to all their questions.

Question 34

How would Rogers elicit information from clients?

Answer 34

He wouldn’t really. He believed that whatever information would be needed in treatment would emerge as the client decided to communicate it.

Question 35

What are Rogers’ three necessary and sufficient qualities of being a successful therapist?

Answer 35

1. Congruence – genuineness and honesty with the client.
2. Empathy – the ability to feel what the client feels.
3. Unconditional positive regard –acceptance and respect towards the client.

Question 36

What is the fully-functioning person in Person-Centred Theory?

Answer 36

Someone who is:

1. More open to experience,
2. Lives their life in an existential (transcends the boundaries of life) way, and
3. Has increased trust in themselves.

Question 37

What is the formative tendency in Person-Centred Theory?

Answer 37

The tendency for all matter to evolve from simpler (primitive unconsciousness) to more complex forms (highly organised awareness)

Question 38

What is the actualising tendency in Person-Centred Theory?

Answer 38

The tendency within all human beings to move toward fulfillment of potentials. Individuals have within themselves the power to become increasingly self-directed.

Question 39

What are the three elements of the self, according to Rogers?

Answer 39

Actual self –what you’re really like

Self-image (self-concept) – How we think we are ourselves. At a simple level, we might perceive ourselves as a good or bad person, beautiful or ugly. Self-concept has an affect on how a person thinks feels and behaves in the world.

Ideal self – This is the person who we would like to be. It consists of our goals and ambitions in life, and is dynamic – i.e. forever changing. The ideal self in childhood is not the ideal self in our teens or late twenties etc.

Question 40

What is congruence and when does it occur?

Answer 40

When the self-concept and ideal self are identical

Question 41

An association between high self-discrepancy and WHICH negative qualities has been reported in research? (two examples)

Answer 41

More alcohol consumption among undergrads with higher self-discrepancy (Wolfe and Maisto, 2000)
Depressed individuals show higher levels of self-discrepancy (Choi and Lee, 1998)

Question 42

According to both Rogers and Maslow, when does maladjustment occur?

Answer 42

When the spontaneous and natural expression of the inner-self is blocked

Question 43

In what sense does Maslow’s theory of SA go one step beyond Rogers’?

Answer 43

In Maslow’s theory, people can go beyond self-actualisation to pursue B-values

Question 44

What is Rogers’ definition of the self-concept?

Answer 44

“The organized consistent conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of ‘I’ or ‘me’ and the perceptions of the relationships of the ‘I’ or ‘me’ to others and to various aspects of life, together with the values attached to these perceptions. It is a gestalt which is available to awareness though not necessarily in awareness. It is a fluid and changing gestalt, a process, but at any given moment it is a specific entity.”

Question 45

Why does it matter for the individual whether positive regard in an environment is conditional or unconditional?

Answer 45

Those raised in an environment of unconditional positive regard have the opportunity to fully actualize themselves. Those raised in an environment of conditional positive regard feel worthy only if they match conditions (what Rogers describes as conditions of worth) that have been laid down for them by others.

Question 46

What is the organismic valuing process (OVP)?

Answer 46

The intuitive mechanism organisms have which tells them what is good and what is bad for them. Organisms through evolution have developed senses, and the capability to interpret sensory information in terms of its value, for that organism. E.g. food that is rotten, and therefore dangerous to eat, will taste bad to a person and they will feel like not eating it.

Question 47

What two mechanism are deployed when self-concept is threatened?

Answer 47

Distortion and denial. Individuals either distort the perception until it fits their self-concept or ignore the threat to self-concept.

Question 48

How can the concept of acceptance lead to perversion of the concept of self-actualisation?

Answer 48

Self-actualizing can be confused with self-image actualizing – “the curse of the ideal”. People would actualize their own self-concepts –and call it quits – instead of achieving self-actualization itself.