Chapter 18-Humanistic or Third-Force Psychology

Question 1

According to third-force psychologists, what was missing from the other two forces in psychology?

Answer 1

Behaviorism and psychoanalysis neglected a number of important human attributes

Behaviorism like and humans to robots, lower animals, or computers, saying there was nothing unique about humans. The major argument against psychoanalysis was that a concentrated mainly on emotionally disturbed people and on developing techniques for making abnormal people normal.

What was missing, was information that would help already healthy individuals become healthier-that is, to reach their full potential. A model of humans that emphasized their uniqueness and they’re positive aspects rather than their negative aspects was needed

Question 2

A persons consciousness

Answer 2

Subjective reality

Question 3

Describe the role of the concept of subjective reality in third-force psychology

Answer 3

Contrasts vividly with other types because it does not assume determinism in explaining human being. Rather, it assumes that humans are free to choose their own type of existence. Instead of attributing the causes of behavior to stimuli, drive states, genetics, or early experience, third-force psychologists claim that the most important cause of behavior is subjective reality

Current science is not equipped to study, explain, or understand human nature and a new science is needed, a human science that would recognize humans as aware, choosing, valuing, emotional, and unique beings in the universe

Question 4

The introspective study of intact, mental experiences

Answer 4

Phenomenology

Question 5

The study of the nature of existence

Answer 5

Ontology

Question 6

Expanded Husserl’s phenomenology to include an examination of the totality of human existence

Answer 6

Martin Heidegger

Question 7

The brand of contemporary psychology that was influenced by existential philosophy. The key concepts include freedom, individuality, responsibility, anxiety, guilt, throwness, and authenticity

Answer 7

Existential psychology

Question 8

Heidegger ‘s term for “being-in-the-world.” The world does not exist without humans, and humans do not exist without the world. Because humans exist in the world, it is there that they must exercise their free will. Being-in-the-world means existing in the world, and existing means interpreting and valuing one’s experiences and making choices regarding those experiences

Answer 8

Dasein

Question 9

According to the existentialists, such as Heidigger, the type of life that is freely chosen and not dictated by the values of others. In such a life, one’s own feelings, values, and interpretations act as a guide for conduct

Answer 9

Authentic life

Question 10

A characteristic of the authentic life because the authentic person is always becoming something other than what he or she was. It is normal, healthy psychological growth of a human being

Answer 10

Becoming

Question 11

A life lived in accordance with values other than those freely and personally chosen. Such a life is characterized by guilt

Answer 11

Inauthentic life

Question 12

According to Heidigger, The feeling that results most intensely from living an inauthentic life

Answer 12

Guilt

Question 13

The feeling that results when one confronts the unknown, as when one contemplates death or when one’s choices carry one into new life circumstances. According to existentialists, one cannot live an authentic life without experiencing this

Answer 13

Anxiety

Question 14

According to Heidigger and Binswanger, The circumstances that characterize a person’s existence that are beyond the person’s control

Answer 14

Throwness

Includes whether we are male or female, short or tall, attractive or unattractive, rich or poor, American or Russian, the time in human history that we are born, and so on

Question 15

Binswanger’s method of psychotherapy that requires that the therapist understand the clients worldview. Examines a persons mode of being-in-the-world

Answer 15

Daseinanalysis

Question 16

The abnormal fear of freedom that results in a person living a life that minimizes personal choice

Answer 16

Neurotic anxiety

Question 17

Results from living an authentic life

Answer 17

Normal anxiety

Question 18

Kierkegaard’s term for the type of life lived by a defensive, inauthentic person

Answer 18

Shut-upness

Question 19

According to existentialists, the condition that results when people except values other than those that they attained freely and personally as guides for living

Answer 19

Self-alienation

Question 20

Examines the stories by which people live and understand their lives and, where necessary, encourages the replacement of ineffective stories with effective ones

Answer 20

Narrative therapy

Question 21

According to May, any human attribute or function that in moderation is positive but in excess is negative

Answer 21

Daimonic

Question 22

Emphasized that it is always possible to construe one’s self and the world in a variety of ways. Psychological problems are essentially perceptual problems

Answer 22

George Kelly

Question 23

According to Kelly, the collection of personal constructs with which people make predictions about future events

Answer 23

Construct systems

Question 24

Kelly’s notion that it is always possible to view ourselves and the world in a variety of ways

Answer 24

Constructive alternativism

Question 25

According to Kelly, the experimentation with ideas to see where they lead

Answer 25

Propositional thinking

Question 26

Describe the similarities between the views of Kelly and Vaihinger

Answer 26

Both emphasized propositional thinking, or the experimentation with ideas to see where they lead

Question 27

The self-description that Kelly required of many of his clients before beginning their therapeutic program

Answer 27

Self-characterization

Provided Kelly with information about how the client to do it himself or herself, the world, and other people

Question 28

Kelly’s brand of therapy whereby he would assign a role for his clients to play that was distinctly different from the clients self-characterization. With this type of therapy, the therapist acts much like a supporting actor

Answer 28

Fixed-role therapy

Kelly’s approach to therapy reflected his belief that psychological problems are perceptual problems and that the job of the therapist is therefore to help the client view things differently

Question 29

A humanistic psychologist who emphasized the inmate human tendency toward self-actualization. Contended that behaviorism and psychoanalysis provided only a partial understanding of human existence and that humanistic, or third-force, psychology needed to be added to complete our understanding

Answer 29

Abraham Maslow

Usually is recognized as the one most responsible for making humanistic psychology a formal branch of psychology

Question 30

What are the basic features of humanistic psychology?

Answer 30

• Little of value can be learned about humans by studying nonhuman animals
• subjective reality is the primary guide for human behavior
• studying individuals is more informative than studying what groups of individuals have in common
• A major effort should be made to discover those things that expand and enrich human experience
• research should seek information that will help solve human problems
• The goal of psychology should be to formulate a complete description of what it means to be a human being. Such a description would include the importance of language, the valuing process, the full range of human emotions, and the ways humans seek and attain meaning in their lives

Question 31

Maslow’s contention that human needs are arranged in a hierarchy and that lower needs in the hierarchy must be adequately satisfied before attention can be focused on lower needs. The most basic and powerful needs in the hierarchy are physiological needs, and then come safety needs, needs forbelonging and love, and the need for self-esteem. When all lower needs in the hierarchy are adequately satisfied, a person becomes self-actualizing

Answer 31

Hierarchy of needs

Question 32

According to Rogers and Maslow, the innate human tendency toward wholeness. This person is open to experience and embraces the higher values of human existence

Answer 32

Self-actualization

Question 33

According to Maslow, the fear of one’s own potential greatness

Answer 33

Jonah complex

Question 34

Describe the characteristics of self-actualizing people

Answer 34

• they perceive reality accurately and fully
• they demonstrate a great acceptance of themselves and of others
• they exhibit spontaneity and naturalness
• they have a need for privacy
• they tend to be independent of their environment and culture
• they demonstrate a continuous freshness of appreciation
• they tend to have periodic mystic or peak experiences
• they are concerned with all humans instead of with only their friends, relatives, and acquaintances
• they tend to have only a few friends
• they have a strong ethical sense but do not necessarily accept conventional ethics
• they have a well-developed but not hostile sense of humor
• they are creative

Question 35

Perception whose purpose is to locate things in the environment that will satisfy a need.

Answer 35

Need-directed perception. Also called deficiency perception or D-perception

Question 36

According to Maslow, motivation that is directed toward the satisfaction of some specific need

Answer 36

Deficiency motivation. Also called D-motivation

Question 37

For Maslow, the type of motivation that characterizes the self-actualizing person. Because it is not need-directed, it embraces the higher values of human existence, such as beauty, truth, and justice

Answer 37

Being motivation. Also called B-motivation

Question 38

Perception that embraces fully “what is there” because it is not an attempt to locate specific items that will satisfy needs

Answer 38

Being perception. Also called B-perception

Question 39

Maslow’s proposed fourth force in psychology that stresses the relationship between the individual and the cosmos, or universe, and in doing so focuses on the mystical and spiritual aspects of human nature

Answer 39

Transpersonal psychology

Question 40

A humanist psychologist whose nondirective and then client-centered psychotherapy was seen by many as the first viable alternative to psychoanalysis as a method for treating troubled individual’s. Like Maslow’s, his theory of personality emphasized the innate tendency toward self-actualization. According to him, a person continues towards self-actualization unless his or her organismic valuing process is displaced by conditions of worth as a guide for living. The only way to avoid creating conditions of worth is to give a person unconditional regard

Answer 40

Carl Rogers

Question 41

According to Rogers, the innate, internal guidance system that a person can use to stay on the track towards self-actualization

Answer 41

Organismic valuing process

Question 42

According to Rogers, the need for positive responses from the relevant people in one’s life

Answer 42

Need for positive regard

Question 43

According to Rogers, the conditions that the relevant people in our lives place on us and that we must meet before these people will give us a positive regard

Answer 43

Conditions of worth

Question 44

According to Rogers, the giving of positive regard without any preconditions

Answer 44

Unconditional positive regard

Question 45

Compare and contrast existential and humanistic psychology

Answer 45

Beliefs they share:

Humans have a free will and are therefore responsible for their actions

The most appropriate method by which to study humans is phenomenology, the study of the intact subjective experience

To be understood, the human must be studied as a whole. Elementism of any type gives a distorted view of human nature

Humans are unique, and therefore anything learned about other animals is irrelevant to the understanding of humans

Each human is unique, therefore, anything learned about one human is irrelevant to the understanding of others

Hedonism is not a major motive in human behavior. Instead of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, humans seek meaningful lives characterized by personal growth

Living and authentic life is better than living and inauthentic one

Because they possess unique attributes such as free will, humans cannot be effectively studied using traditional scientific methodology. Perhaps humans can be studied objectively, but to do so would require the creation of a new, uniquely human science

Differences: the major difference lies in their assumptions about human nature. The humanists assume that humans are basically good, and therefore, if placed in a healthy environment, they will naturally live a life in harmony with other animals. For humanists, the major motivation in life is the actualizing tendency, which is innate and which continually drives a person toward those activities and events conducive to self-actualization.
The existentialists, on the other hand, you human nature as a sensually neutral. For them, the only thing we are born with is the freedom to choose the nature of our existence

Question 46

Describe Sartre’s famous statement and explain its meaning

Answer 46

“Existence precedes essence”

For him and most existential philosophers, there is no human essence at birth. We are free to choose our own essence as a unique human being. We become our choices “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism”

Question 47

Describe Erich Fromm’s view of freedom

Answer 47

Said that often the first thing people do when they recognize their freedom is attempt to escape from it by affiliating themselves with someone or something that will reduce or eliminate their choices

Question 48

Identify the commonly cited criticisms and contributions of humanistic psychology

Answer 48

Criticisms:

Equates behaviorism with the work of Watson and skinner. Other behaviorists stress both mental events and purpose in their analysis of behavior whereas Watson and skinner denied the importance of mental events

Overlooks the cumulative nature of science by insisting that scientific psychology does not care about the loftier human attributes

The description of humans that humanistic psychologists offer is like the more favorable ones found through the centuries in poetry, literature, or religion. It represents a type of wishful thinking that is not supported by the fact that more objective psychology has accumulated. We should not ignore facts just because they are not our liking

Criticizes behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and scientific psychology in general, but all three have made significant contributions to the betterment of The human condition

If it rejects traditional scientific methodology as a means for evaluating pro positions about humans, what is to be used in its place? Their approach to studying humans is often characterized as a throwback to psychologies prescientific past

By rejecting animal research, they are turning their backs on an extremely valuable source of knowledge about humans

Many of the terms and concepts that humanistic psychologists use are so nebulous that they defy clear definition and verification

Contributions: they do recognize the importance of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and scientific psychology but say that the only tell a part of the story.

It’s a major contribution is the expansion of psychologies domain. There is now an increased tendency to study the whole person and we are concerned with not only help people learn, think, and which are biologically and intellectually but also help people formulate plans to attain future goals and why people laugh, cry, and create meaning in their lives

Question 49

Field in contemporary psychology that explores the positive attributes of humans but does so in a more scientifically rigorous and less self-centered way than was often the case with traditional humanistic psychology

Answer 49

Positive psychology

Question 50

The branch of psychology that is closely aligned with existential psychology. Unlike existential psychology, however, assumes that humans are basically good. That is, if negative environmental factors do not stifle human development, humans will live humane lives. Concerned with examining the more positive aspects of human nature that behaviorism and psychoanalysis had neglected

Also called third-force psychology

Answer 50

Humanistic psychology