Existential, humanistic & postive psych Part TWO Flashcards
Positive Psychology Factors
Factors that contribute to or detract from happiness and subjective well-being
• after a base level of money, building relationships and overcoming
challenges (supports Maslow’s hierarchy of needs); avoiding
unproductive rumination and negative events and appreciating the
good things in life
Optimism
Optimism has advantages and disadvantages:
• less fearful, more willing to take risks, relatively happy; take
foolish risks or fail to anticipate problem
Virtues:
courage, justice, humanity (compassion), temperance, wisdom, transcendence
May be evolutionarily based: they are seen in many different
cultures and they solve crucial survival problems • But not everyone has them all
Courage
emotional strengths that involves exercise of the will to accomplish goals in the face of the opposition; examples include bravery, perseverance, and honesty
Justice
Strengths that underlie unhealthy community life; examples include fairness, leadership and teamwork
Humanity
Strengths that protecting and taking care of others; examples include love and kindness
Temperance
Strengths protect against excess; examples forgiveness , humility, prudence and self control
Wisdom
strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge examples include creativity, curiosity,judgement and perspective
Transcendence
Things that give meaning to life by connecting to the larger universe examples include gratitude, hope and spirituality
Positive Psychology is
not the rebirth of humanism
• It does not say much about existential anxiety or the difficult
dilemmas that arise from free will
• Focuses on subjective well-being, which is a limited phenomenological analysis
• Some view it as moralistic and ethnocentric
Conscious Experience
cannot be explained by science and is difficult to describe in words
Problems
Assuming conscious awareness is not important and proceeding as
if it did not exist
• Treating conscious experience as a form of information processing done by a computer
Cognitive theories
consciousness is a higher-order cognitive process that organizes thoughts and allows flexible decision making
• Consciousness is a feeling
The Implications of Phenomenology: Understanding Others
To understand another person, you must understand his or her construals
•Discourages judgmental attitudes about others
• Your view may not be right • Do not assume others interpret the world the same way you do
Consequence:
cultural and moral relativism (idea that there is no objective reality, or if there is, there is no way to know what it is)
Do not judge the values and practices of other cultures from the perspective of your own
