Humanism Humanistic humanism and humanist are terms in

Humanism • Humanistic, humanism, and humanist are terms in psychology relating to an approach which studies the whole person, and the uniqueness of each individual • Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the person doing the behaving • Humanistic psychologists believe that an individual's behavior is connected to their inner feelings and self concept

BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL MOTIVES

Biological Motives • Our biological needs are critical to our survival and well-being • Homeostasis: the tendency of all organisms to correct imbalances and deviations from their normal state ▫ Several of the drives that motivate behavior are homeostasis (hunger)

Hunger • Psychosocial hunger factors: external cues that can affect eating, such as where, when, and what we eat ▫ ▫ ▫ Smell Appearance of food When other people are eating Choose not to eat because of social pressures Boredom or stress Habit �These can contribute to eating disorders, such as binge eating, eating when depressed, or not eating enough

Obesity • An obese person is 30% or more above his/her ideal body weight • An overweight person is 20% above his/her ideal body weight ▫ Overweight people respond to external cues (smell) while normal-weight people respond to internal cues (stomach signals of hunger) ▫ Insufficient exercise contributes to obesity ▫ **Anxiety and depression are not causes of overeating – these conditions occur just as frequently among people over normal weight

Social Motives: Measuring the Need for Achievement • The achievement motive concerns the desire to set challenging goals and to persist in trying to reach those goals despite obstacles, frustrations, and setbacks ▫ Fear of Failure: people display fear of failure when they choose easy tasks offering assured success or impossible tasks with no chance of success �People who are motivated by the fear of failure often find excuses to explain their poor performances to maintain a good self-image �Fear of Success �Expectancy: your estimated likelihood of success �Value: what the goal is worth to you �Too easy a task or too difficult a task means we do not learn anything about how competent we are

Emotions • Emotion: a subjective feeling provoked by real or imagined objects or events that have high significance to the individual • Drive/motivation: when we want to emphasize the needs, desires, and mental calculations that lead to goal-directed behavior • Emotion/affect: when we want to stress the feelings associated with these decisions and activities • Sometimes emotions function like biological drives – our feelings energize us and make us pursue a goal which goal we pursue depends on our social learning experience; other times we do things because we think they will make us feel good – anticipated emotion; emotions help us make decisions and communicate what is going on inside of us • Emotional intelligence: the ability to perceive, imagine, and understand emotions and to use that information in decision making

Emotions • Emotions result from four occurrences: ▫ 1. you must interpret some stimulus ▫ 2. you have a subjective feeling such as fear or happiness ▫ 3. you experience physiological responses such as an increased hear rate ▫ 4. you display an observable behavior, such as smiling or crying

Emotions • All emotions have 3 part: physical, behavior, and cognitive • Physical: how the emotion affects the physical arousal of an individual – this arousal directs the body how to respond to the experienced emotion • Behavioral: outward expression of the emotion: body language, hand gestures, and the tone of a person’s voice • Cognitive: how we think about or interpret a situation, which affects our emotions

Emotions • Certain basic facial expressions are innate- part of our biological inheritance ▫ Ex. - Observations of children who were born without sight and hearing (they could not have learned how to communicate feelings by observing other people yet still laugh at people when they are happy, pout and frown to express resentment, and clench their fists and teeth in anger)

Theories of Emotion • JAMES – LANGE THEORY ▫ ▫ You experience physiological changes Your brain interprets the physiological changes You feel a specific emotion You demonstrate observable behavior

Theories of Emotion • Facial Feedback Theory ▫ The muscles in your face move to form an expression ▫ Your brain interprets the muscle movement ▫ You feel an emotion ▫ You demonstrate observable behavior

Theories of Emotion • Cannon-Bard Theory ▫ Your experience activated the hypothalamus ▫ This produces messages to the cerebral cortex and your body organs – the reacting organs activate sensory signals ▫ Sensory signals combine with cortical message, yielding emotion

Theories of Emotion • Schacter-Singer Experiment ▫ ▫ You experience physiological arousal You interpret (cognitively) environmental cues You feel an emotion You demonstrate observable behavior

Abraham Maslow 1908 -1970

Maslow • Believed that all human beings need to feel competent, to win approval and recognition, and to sense that they have achieved something • After we satisfy the bottom of the hierarchy of needs triangle, we advance up to the next level and seek to satisfy the needs at that level • If we are at a higher level and our basic needs (on a lower level) are not satisfied, we may come back down the hierarchy

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Hierarchy of Needs • 1. The physiological needs. These include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins. Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of wastes (CO 2, sweat, urine, and feces), and to avoid pain.

Hierarchy of Needs • 2. The safety and security needs. When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, this second layer of needs comes into play. You will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, protection. You might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits.

Hierarchy of Needs • 3. The love and belonging needs. When physiological needs and safety needs are taken care of, a third layer starts to show up. You begin to feel the need for friends, a partner, children, affectionate relationships in general, even a sense of community.

Hierarchy of Needs • 4. The esteem needs. Next, we begin to look for a little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom.

Hierarchy of Needs • 5. Self-Actualization. These people were realitycentered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine. They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to. And they had a different perception of means and ends. They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and that the means - the journey - was often more important than the ends.

Hierarchy of Needs • 5. Self-actualization cont. The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to others. First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone. And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people. • They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs. And they resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in" they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.

Hierarchy of Needs • 5. Self-actualization cont. They had an unhostile sense of humor - preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk. On the other hand, they were often strongly motivated to change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed. Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity: They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial. In fact, for all their nonconformity, he found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less selfactualizing nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic

Hierarchy of Needs • 5. Self-actualization cont. Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others - something Maslow also called democratic values - meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow called human kinship: social interest, compassion, humanity. And this was accompanied by a strong ethics, which was spiritual but seldom conventionally religious in nature. • And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder. Along with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original. And, finally, these people tended to have more peak experiences than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God. It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal. These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better, and many people actively seek them out. They are also called mystical experiences, and are an important part of many religious and philosophical traditions.

Carl Rogers 1902 -1987

Rogers • Agreed to the main assumptions of Maslow but added that for a person to “grow, ” they need an environment that provides them with the genuineness (openness and self-disclosure), acceptance (being seen with unconditional positive regard), and empathy (being listened to and understood) • Without these, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should

Self-Actualization • When a person can achieve his/her goals, wishes, and desires in life • Believed that humans have one basic motive, that is the tendency to self-actualize (to fulfill one's potential and achieve the highest level of 'humanbeingness' we can) • This means that self-actualization occurs when a person’s “ideal self” (who they would like to be) is congruent with their actual behavior (self-image). Rogers describes an individual who is actualizing as a fully functioning person. The main determinant of whether we will become self-actualized is childhood experience.

The Fully Functioning Person • 1. Open to experience: both positive and negative emotions accepted. Negative feelings are not denied, but worked through (rather than resort to ego defense mechanisms). • 2. Existential living: in touch with different experiences as they occur in life, avoiding prejudging and preconceptions. Being able to live and fully appreciate the present, not always looking back to the past or forward to the future (i. e. living for the moment). • 3. Trust feelings: feeling, instincts and gut-reactions are paid attention to and trusted. People’s own decisions are the right ones and we should trust ourselves to make the right choices. • 4. Creativity: creative thinking and risk taking are features of a person’s life. Person does not play safe all the time. This involves the ability to adjust and change and seek new experiences. • 5. Fulfilled life: person is happy and satisfied with life, and always looking for new challenges and experiences.

Self-concept • Self worth (or self-esteem) – what we think about ourselves. Rogers believed feelings of self-worth developed in early childhood and were formed from the interaction of the child with the mother and father. • Self-image – How we see ourselves, which is important to good psychological health. Self-image includes the influence of our body image and inner personality. At a simple level, we might perceive ourselves as a good or bad person, beautiful or ugly. Self-image 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.

Self Worth • How we think about ourselves, our feelings of self-worth are of fundamental importance both to psychological health and to the likelihood that we can achieve goals and ambitions in life and achieve self-actualization • Self-worth may be seen as a continuum from very high to very low. For Carl Rogers, a person who has high self-worth, that is, has confidence and positive feelings about him or her self, faces challenges in life, accepts failure and unhappiness at times, and is open with people. • A person with low self-worth may avoid challenges in life, not accept that life can be painful and unhappy at times, and will be defensive and guarded with other people. Rogers believed feelings of self-worth developed in early childhood and were formed from the interaction of the child with the mother and father. As a child grows older, interactions with significant others will affect feelings of self-worth.

Positive Regard • Unconditional positive regard is where parents, significant others (and the humanist therapist) accepts and loves the person for what he or she is. Positive regard is not withdrawn if the person does something wrong or makes a mistake. The consequences of unconditional positive regard are that the person feels free to try things out and make mistakes, even though this may lead to getting it worse at times. People who are able to self-actualize are more likely to have received unconditional positive regard from others, especially their parents in childhood.

Positive Regard • Conditional positive regard is where positive regard, praise and approval, depend upon the child, for example, behaving in ways that the parents think correct. Hence the child is not loved for the person he or she is, but on condition that he or she behaves only in ways approved by the parent(s). At the extreme, a person who constantly seeks approval from other people is likely only to have experienced conditional positive regard as a child.