Humanistic approach

Question 1

What does the Humanistic approach reject?

Answer 1

Determinism and acknowledges free will

Question 2

What is self actualisation?

Answer 2

Innate need for personal growth, to reach your full potential

Question 3

What is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

Answer 3

• Self actualisation (morality, creativity)
• Esteem (self esteem, confidence)
• Love and belonging (friendship, family, sexual intimacy)
• Safety (employment, property, health)
• Physiological (breathing, food, water, sleep, sex)

Question 4

What did Carl Rodgers say we must have to reach self actualisation?

Answer 4

have congruence
- our ideal self must be consistent with our perceived self. If a too big gap exists, self actualisation will not be possible due to negative feelings of self work

Question 5

What is inconguerence?

Answer 5

• Far from ideal self
• can lead to feeling of worthlessness, low self esteem

Question 6

What does inconguerence arise from?

Answer 6

• lack of unconditional positive regard
• childhood were parents set limit on love (conditions of worth)

Question 7

What did Rodger’s create?

Answer 7

• ‘Client centred therapy’
• Provides the client with genuiness, empathy, unconditional positive regard
• this increases a person’s feeling of self worth

Question 8

What does the humanistic approach focus on?

Answer 8

Focus on the conscious experience on personal responsibility and free will, rather than determinism, and on discussion on experience

Question 9

A03 - Strength - Takes a holisitic approach

Answer 9

• Rejects the attempt to break up behaviour and experience into smaller components
• Behaviourists explain human and animal learning in terms of simple stimulus-response connections
• Cognitive approach sees human beings as little more than information-processing ‘machines’
• The humanistic approach advocate holism, the idea that the subjective experience can only be understood by considering the whole person
• May have more validity than other approaches as it considers meaningful human behaviours with real world context

Question 10

A03 - Strength - Only positive approach

Answer 10

• It is optimistic
• Acknowledges free will, whereas other approaches take a deterministic approach
• Humanistic psychologists have been praised for bringing the person back into psychology and promoting a positive image of the human condition
• Freud saw humans as prisoners of their past and claimed that all of us exist between the ‘common unhappiness and absolute despair’
• This suggests that the humanistic approach offers a refreshing and optimistic alternative to other approaches

Question 11

A03 - Limitation - lacks scientific rigor

Answer 11

• Humanists (particularly Rodgers) reject the use of scientific methods to study human behaviours
• However, by doing so we fail to establish causal relationships
• Without experimental research, establishing the validity of a therapy (i.e. client-centred therapy) and theory underlying it becomes very dificult
• Establishing validity and falsifying theories is a key element of the scientific methods
• Therefore, taking a humanistic approach may push psychology away from being seen as a scientific discipline, reducing its integrity

Question 12

A03 - Limitations - It may be culturally biased

Answer 12

• One limitation is that it may be culturally be biased
• For example, a study carried out in China (Nevis) found that belonginess needs were seen as more fundamental than physiological needs and that self-actualisation was defined more in terms of contributions to the community than in terms of individual development
• Therefore, this approach may not be applicable in some cultures,