Week 13 - Growth Motivation and Positive Psychology

Holism and Positive Psychology

“If this essential core, inner nature of the person is frustrated, denied, or suppressed, sickness results” (Maslow 1968, as taken from Reeve 2009). 

For some people there is a constant battle between inner temperament and sociocultural pressures.  What is expected from people around you, friends, family, society, in comparison to the person who you actually are.  Reeve states that particularly for university students there is an expectation to be extroverted.  This would be specifically the case for someone who was living on university residents, as these type of students are expected to keep up with everyone, binge drinking and partying regularly.  Positive psychology focuses on the inner guides like meaning, authenticity and the passion to learn which assist in adding strength and wellness which inturn makes us happy, instead of following cultural expectancies.

Holism

Holism = Whole or Wholeness, study of what is healthy or unbroken 

Holism is concerned with assessing the person as a whole, rather than a series of differentiated parts.  Holism and positive psychology can be best understood as a “top down” approach meaning that the focus is on all encompassing motives, seeing how the master motives govern the more specific ones. A broken view of personality concerns human beings as fragmented sets of structures of forces that oppose one another for example the conflict between the ideal self and an actual self.  Humanistic psychology is about discovering human potential and encouraging its development, specifically toward growth and self realisation and away from facade, self-concealment and the pleasing and fulfilling the expectations of others. This type of self discovery can be considered when assessing why adolescents have such a hard time.  As social expectancies from friends develop and pressures from parents to behave a certain way.

Positive Psychology is concerned with the “good life” uses empirical methods of psychology to understand what makes life worth living.  It seeks to make people stronger and more productive, and to actualize the human potential in all of us. Instead of focusing on fixing the weaknesses within an individual it focuses on developing and amplifying peoples strengths.  Hence it could be seen as a positive method instead of negative.  I think this would be a good way to support those who are suffering depression.  Instead on focusing on the depression, focus on the aspects of the individual that are positive, and teach the depressed person to also focus on these aspects instead of looking at all of the negative things.

Positive psychology was empirically developed by Seligman in the 1990’s as a continuation from his work on learned helplessness.  Maslow and Rogers work on personal growth and actualization was not based on empirical research where as the work by Seligman was, his website is called the Positive Psychology Center. http://www.positivepsychology.org/

Self Actualization

Is about moving towards autonomy and realizing ones talents, capacities and potentialities.  It contains two fundamental directions

Autonomy and Openness

Autonomy is about depending on the self and regulating ones own thoughts, feelings and behaviours

Openness is being open to experience and receiving information.

One of the most talked about theories across various disciplines is Maslow’s motivational theory called the Hierarchy of Human Needs.  Maslow claimed that to reach self actualization you need to gratify each need, which is layered in steps, the most basic being physiological needs such as food, water and shelter.  Maslow classified the first four needs as deficiency needs, an analogy used is that of a vitamin, if these needs are in absence, growth and development is inhibited.  Growth need surfaces once deficiency needs have been adequately met. Growth need is predominantly based around the top need in the pyramid, which is self actualisation needs, which provide energy and direction to become what one is capable of becoming.  A few problems with Maslows Hierarchy, as stated in the lecture, is that 1) as the top of the pyramid, self actualisation, is the smallest part, it is the weakest need 2) Maslow states that only 1% of people ever self actualise 3) people need to progress through the stages when in fact there are people in the world who do self actualise without some of the needs e.g. homeless artist.

Maslow also described six behaviours for encouraging self actualisation

1.     Make Growth Choices- life is a series of choices, choose toward progression and growth

2.     Be Honest – be different, unpopular, nonconformist, be honest and true to yourself and take responsibility for your choices and consequences of choices

3.     Situationally Position Yourself for Peak Experiences – become an expert in your field, if there is something you love doing, then do more of it.

4.     Give up defensiveness – be open to the mistakes you make and learn from them

5.     Let the Self Emerge – listen to your own personal interests and aspirations of who you want to become.

6.     Be Open to Experience – Be spontaneous, original and open to experience, try and drop the self consciousness, defenses or shyness. Stop and smell the roses.

Finally engage in fulfilling relationships which support autonomy and openness.

Actualizing Tendency.

“The organism has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing self” (Rogers, 1951)

Rogers believed that actualizing tendency was innate, an example used to demonstrate this is of a child persisting through the struggle of crawling to walking, to which is “the forward thrust of life” which supports the child to continue moving forward.

Organismic Valuation Process – an innate capability for judging whether a specific experience promotes or reverses growth. Enhancing experiences are positively held and thus given the green light, where as experiences seen as regressive are growth blocking and given the red light and are subsequently avoided.

Actualising Tendency – motivates the individual to want to undertake now and challenging experiences.

Causality orientations are the forces that cause behaviour.  These can either be autonomy or control, autonomy meaning the self and control meaning external.  I think that these are interesting topics and I wonder if there would be a correlation with personality traits.  For example maybe someone who is introverted may be more likely to have a control causality orientation.

Critique of positive psychology.

As stated in Reeve (2009) terms used in positive psychology seem vague and ill defined.  I completely agree with this comment, as I was reading the text-book and writing the notes above the topic seems all a bit airy fairy although this is changing with empirical support.  Another point that is important to mention is the fact that it may be all good and well to talk about how to change a person to be more positive, but what about all of the negative emotions that are humanly innate such as jealously,and insecurity that come from people being in situations that they cannot change such as low socio-economic status.