COURSE NOTES: Personality

denotes a term that you should know how to define, and to recognize and give examples. denotes an important person. You should remember this person's name and what (s)he has done. denotes an important research finding. denotes an issue that you should be able to discuss or explain.

THE HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE

• This perspective focuses on "higher," more developed, and healthier aspects of human experience and their development, e.g. spirituality, creativity, and tolerance.
• This perspective values the subjective experience of the individual, including emotional experience.
• Humanistic psychologists emphasize the present rather than the past or the future.
• Each individual is responsible for his or her own life outcomes, aided by a capacity for self-reflection.
• This perspective seeks to improve the human condition by changing the environment in which people develop. It assumes that, given appropriate conditions, individuals will develop in a desirable direction.

Chapter 14: 

Rogers: Person-Centered Theory

The Actualizing Tendency

• a plant's innate tendency to grow (even in poor soil)
• a person's tendency toward self-actualization

Rogers used an "organic metaphor."

The Organismic Valuing Process

organismic valuing process: inner sense within a person, which guides him or her in the directions of growth and health

• the inner vague feeling that choosing a certain career, or a certain love partner, would be wrong for you, even if everyone else approves of that choice

[supplementary to the text] Rogers criticized graduate education at the University of Wisconsin for being unhumanistic.

• Despite stringent admissions criteria, only 1 out of 7 graduate students in psychology actually completed the PhD.
• Rogers accused U. Wisconsin of making 10 erroneous assumptions about graduate education.

1. The student cannot be trusted to pursue his own scientific and professional learning.
   • How can this foster their ability to make original, significant, creative contributions to psychological science and practice?
2. Ability to pass examinations is the best criterion for student selection and for judging professional promise.
   • We need better ways of evaluating originality and independence of thought, as well as intelligence. All should be used as criteria to select graduate students.
3. Evaluation is education; education is evaluation.
   • Other things being equal, the best background training for a psychologist is a broad education including the humanities, arts, and sciences.
4. Presentation equals learning: what is presented in lecture is what the student learns.
   • Students should be provided with a climate that stimulates and encourages their freedom to make sensible educational choices.
5. Knowledge is the accumulation of brick upon brick of content and information.
   • Significant learning takes place when the student sees the relevance of the subject matter for her/his own purposes and development.
6. The truths of psychology are known.
   • Learning occurs by doing: by experiencing research problems, clinical problems, ethical and philosophical problems.
7. Method is science.
   • Learning is most likely to occur in the students when the faculty member approaches the interaction as a learner, rather than a teacher.
8. Creative scientists develop from passive learners.
   • The students should take responsibility: for choosing directions, making contributions, and living with the consequences of his/her choices.
9. "Weeding out" a majority of the students is a satisfactory method of producing scientists and clinicians.
   • Creativity of thought is facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic, and evaluation by others is regarded as minimally important.
10. Students are best regarded as manipulative objects, not as persons.
    • Assume that students, once selected, will develop their own research and professional competence. The faculty role is to certify this competence based on the students' research, professional work, and other products of his/her learning. If psychologists beyond the faculty are involved in this certification, so much the better.

The Fully Functioning Person

• Rogers's term for a mentally healthy person
• Openness to Experience
• Existential Living
• Organismic Trusting
• Experiential Freedom
• Creativity

Subjective Experience, Values, and Science

• Spirituality, as well as subjectivity, are consistent with Rogers's theory, which does not aspire to be value-free.

The Self

• ideal self -- real self discrepancy
• incongruence

Development

conditions of worth: the expectations that a person must live up to before receiving respect and love

unconditional positive regard: accepting and valuing a person without requiring particular behaviors as a prerequisite

• Being accepted and loved even if your grades are low, your weight is wrong, and your attitude is questionable

Development of Creativity

• Statements typical of parents of preschool children who later became creative:
  • "I respect my child's opinions and encourage him to express them."
  • "I encourage my child to be curious, to explore and question things."
  • And the parents disagreed with these statements:
    • "I do not allow my child to get angry with me."
    • "I feel my child is a bit of a disappointment to me."

Therapy

Client-Centered Therapy

• unconditional positive regard (prizing)
• congruence
• empathic understanding

People nurture others' growth in these ways: (applies to therapists, friends, family, etc.)

• being genuine (open with feelings; self-disclosing)
• being accepting (offering unconditional positive regard)
• being empathic (sharing and mirroring our feelings; reflecting our meanings)

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Therapeutic Progress

• Two persons are in psychological contact.
• The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.
• The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.
• The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.
• The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.
• The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved.

Research on Therapy

Q-sort results: Real-self and ideal-self descriptions come closer after therapy.

Stages of Process

Encounter Groups

• facilitator

Other Applications

Humanistic Education

• person-centered
• facilitator of education (not "teacher")
• pays attention to feelings as well as the intellect

Marriage and Relationships

• modern context for marriage
• mutuality, equality, honest communication
• satellite relationships
• friendship

Social Welfare Programs

Business

• relationships based on genuineness, acceptance, and empathic understanding
• instead of traditional authority
• shared power and decision making

Political Conflict, War, and Peace

Criticisms of Rogers's Theory

• Client-centered therapy is no more effective than other therapies.
• Is the theory overly optimistic about human nature, ignoring evil?

• http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Rogers/therapy.htm
• http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Rogers/personality.htm

• Association for Humanistic Psychology (home page)
  http://www.ahpweb.org/
  
  
• Humanistic Psychology Bibliography (Warmoth, 1994)
  http://www.ahpweb.org/pub/bibliography.html
  
  
• Humanistic Psychology Bibliography (Rowan, 1997)
  http://ahpweb.org/rowan_bibliography/index.html
  

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