Chapter 15 – Growth Motivation and Positive Psychology

Humanistic Psychology

• Humanistic Psychologists
  • Rejecting one’s nature in favor of social priorities places personal growth and psychological well-being at risk
• Holism and Positive Psychology
• Holism
  • We are best understood as an integrated, organized whole vs. differentiated parts
  • The study of what is healthy
  • Humanistic Psychology
    • Focuses on the self and its strivings toward fulfillment.
    • Discovering human potential and encouraging its development
      Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology

• Endorses meaning, authenticity, and the passion to learn builds on our strength and wellness
• Goal
  • Investigate positive subjective experiences, such as well-being, satisfaction, hope, competence, love, altruism, nurturance of others
• Asks questions
  • How can we develop and amplify people’s strengths

Self-Actualization

• Self-Actualization
  • Moving toward courage to create realistic appraisals and autonomous self-regulation
• Two directions:
  • Autonomy – Ability to depend on one’s self
  • Openness – being able to receive information and feelings
• Hierarchy of Human Needs – (Fig. 15.1)
  • 3 themes:
    • Needs arrange themselves in the hierarchy according to strength
    • The lower the need, the quicker it appears in development
    • Needs are fulfilled sequentially
  • Deficiency Needs –
    • Without them we are inhibited to grow and develop
  • Growth Needs
    • Provide energy and direction to become what one is capable of becoming
  • Research on the Need Hierarchy
    • Popular but little empirical support
      
      
• Encouraging Growth
  • We fail to reach potential
    • Non-supportive environment
    • We fear our own potential
    • We have superficial relationships

Actualizing Tendency

• Actualizing Tendency
  • An innate presence that guides us toward our potentials
• Rogers – all human needs serve the collective purpose of maintaining, enhancing, and actualizing the person
  • Experiences seen as maintaining or enhancing us are positively valued
  • Experiences seen as regressive are valued negatively
• Emergence of the Self
  • The actualizing tendency begins to emerge
  • The emergence of the self leads us to need positive regard
    • Approval, acceptance, love from others
      Actualizing Tendency, cont.
• Conditions of Worth
  • Young children learn the conditions of worth of their behavior and themselves are judged as either positive and worthy of acceptance or negative and worthy of rejection
  • The child internalizes parental conditions of worth into how they define themselves
  • As adults, we learn from many people what behaviors are good, bad, desirable, undesirable
  • If given unconditional positive regard, children have no need to internalize societal conditions of worth
    Actualizing Tendency, cont.
• Congruence
  • Accept the full range of your personal characteristics, abilities, desires and beliefs
  • Incongruence – deny and reject your characteristics, abilities, desires and beliefs
• Fully Functioning Individual
  • Open to experience and accepts the experiences they encounter

Causality Orientations

• Causality Orientations
• Internal guides – autonomy causality orientation
  • Internal locus of control
  • Intrinsic motivation and identified regulation
• External guides – control causality orientation
  • Focus on behavioral incentives
  • Extrinsic regulation and introjected regulation

Growth-Seeking Vs. Validation Seeking

• Growth-seeking individuals – Strive to learn, improve and reach potential.
  • Negative outcomes help you learn where you need to improve
  • The more you strive for growth, the more likely you are to have high self-esteem, low anxiety and low depression
  • This grows out of supportive, nonjudgmental and accepting parenting
• Validation-seeking individuals – seek external validation to measure their personal worth, competence and likeability.
  • The more you strive for validation, the more likely you are to suffer anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem
  • This grows out of critical, conditional and perfectionistic parenting
• Ask yourself: Instead of enjoying activities and social interactions, most situations to me feel like a major test of my basic worth, competence, or likeability
  • Personal growth is more important to me than protecting myself from my fears
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How do relationships support the actualizing tendency

• Humanistic Therapy – therapist brings warmth, genuineness, empathy, interpersonal acceptance, and confirmation of the client’s capacity for self-determination
• Helping Others 
  • Letting the client or friend/spouse discover and then be themselves
    How do relationships support the actualizing tendency
• Relatedness to Others
  • The quality of your relationships
  • Ainsworth research (secure, insecure avoidant, insecure ambivalent)
• Freedom to Learn
  • We need to do self-discovery and self-evaluation
  • Humanistic education involves 3 themes
    • The facilitator functions as a structuring agent in an open classroom
    • Students take responsibility for initiating their own learning
    • Students learn cooperatively and in a context of the peer group
• Self-Definition and Social Definition
  • Self-defined people resist outside definitions and favor internal definitions of themselves
  • Socially defined people accept outside definitions of who they are

Evil

• The Problem of Evil
• Humanistic therapists have a difficult time with people behaving in evil ways
• Rogers stated that evil was not inherent in human nature
• When people desire to act in ways that promote evil, they possess a malevolent personality

Positive Psychology and Mental Health

• Positive Psychology
  • Seeks to build people’s strengths and competencies
  • Building strengths fosters personal growth, well-being, preventing human illnesses from becoming part of one’s personality
  • Optimism – the tendency to see ourselves in a positive light
    • Associated with well-being and improved performance
    • Optimists
    • Optimism and can be taught and learned, but it’s also inherent
  • Meaning in life
    • Need for purpose
    • Need for values
    • Need for efficacy
  • Creating meaning is an active process

Criticisms

• Humanistic theorists utilize poorly defined constructs
• Why is there continual prejudice, crime, and war when we should nurture human nature
• What is the actualizing tendency
• Feelings are the royal road to the true self