Question

What are the key aspects of Maslow’s biography?

Describe Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

What are the different types of needs according to Maslow?

What does metapathology and metamotivation mean?

What are the B-values?

What is self-actualization, and what are the criteria for self-actualization?

What 15 tentative qualities did Maslow find characterize self-actualizing people?

Describe the research methods and results from Reiss & Havercamp (2006) and from Lyubomirsky et al. (2011).

Rogers developed his personality theory largely based on what type of experiences?

Define the key aspects of Rogers’ therapeutic approach.

What are the formative tendency and the actualizing tendency?

According to Rogers, what are the two basic needs subsumed within the actualizing tendency?

How did Rogers conceptualize the self?

How did Rogers describe incongruence and congruence?

Describe Rogers’ concept of defensiveness and the two chief defenses he believed people use.

Describe Rogers’ “person of tomorrow.”

Describe Rogers’ client-centered therapy research known as “the Chicago studies.”

Answer 1

1. What are the key aspects of Maslow’s biography?

• Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children and was classed as "mentally unstable" by a psychologist.
• His parents were first generation Jewish immigrants from Russia from Kiev who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century..They had decided to live in New York City and in a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood.
• His parents were poor and not intellectually focused, but they valued education. It was a tough time for Maslow, as he experienced anti-Semitism from his teachers and from other children around the neighborhood. He had various encounters with anti-Semitic gangs who would chase and throw rocks at him.
• Maslow and other young people at the time with his background were struggling to overcome such acts of racism and ethnic prejudice in the attempt to establish an idealistic world based on widespread education and monetary justice.
• He also grew up with few friends other than his cousin Will, and as a result, "He grew up in libraries and among books."
• It was here that he developed his love for reading and learning. He went to Boys High School, one of the top high schools in Brooklyn.
• Here, he served as the officer to many academic clubs, and became editor of the Latin Magazine. He also edited Principia, the school's Physics paper, for a year. He developed other strengths as well:

College and university

• Maslow attended the City College of New York after high school. In 1926 he began taking legal studies classes at night in addition to his undergraduate course load. He hated it and almost immediately dropped out. In 1927 he transferred to Cornell, but he left after just one semester due to poor grades and high costs.
• He later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. In 1928, he married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time. The pair had met in Brooklyn years earlier. Maslow's psychology training at UW was decidedly experimental-behaviorist.
• At Wisconsin he pursued a line of research which included investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality. Maslow's early experience with behaviorism would leave him with a strong positivist mindset.
• Upon the recommendation of Professor Hulsey Cason, Maslow wrote his master's thesis on "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material".
• Maslow regarded the research as embarrassingly trivial, but he completed his thesis the summer of 1931 and was awarded his master's degree in psychology.
• He was so ashamed of the thesis that he removed it from the psychology library and tore out its catalog listing. However, Professor Carson admired the research enough to urge Maslow to submit it for publication. Maslow's thesis was published as two articles in 1934.

Academic career

• He continued his research at Columbia University, on similar themes. There he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College.
• His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas. After World War II, Maslow began to question the way psychologists had come to their conclusions, and though he did not completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind.
• He called his new discipline humanistic psychology. Maslow was already a 33-year-old father and had two children when the United States entered World War II in 1941.
• He was thus ineligible for the military. However, the horrors of war instead inspired a vision of peace in him and this led to his groundbreaking psychological studies of self-actualizing people. These studies began with his two mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally.
• These two were so accomplished in both realms, and such "wonderful human beings" as well, that Maslow began taking notes about them and their behavior. This would be the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential.
• He wrote extensively on the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists but adding significantly to them, especially the concepts of a hierarchy of needs, metaneeds, metamotivation, self-actualizing persons, and peak experiences.
• Maslow was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969, and then became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California. In 1967, Maslow had an almost fatal heart attack, and knew his time was limited. Maslow considered himself to be a psychological pioneer. He gave future psychologists a push by bringing to light different paths to ponder.
• He built the framework that later allowed other psychologists to add in more information. Maslow long believed that leadership should be non-intervening. Consistent with this approach, he rejected a nomination in 1963 to be president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology because he felt that the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.

Death

• While jogging, Maslow suffered a severe heart attack and died on June 8, 1970, at the age of 62 in Menlo Park, California.

Legacy

• Later in life, Maslow was concerned with questions such as, "Why don't more people self-actualize if their basic needs are met? How can we humanistically understand the problem of evil?"
• In the spring of 1961, Maslow and Tony Sutich founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, with Miles Vich as editor until 1971 The journal printed its first issue in early 1961 and continues to publish academic papers.
• Maslow attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology's founding meeting in 1963 where he declined nomination as its president, arguing that the new organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader which resulted in useful strategy during the field's early years.
• In 1967, Maslow was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association

2. Describe Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Hierarchy of needs

An interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom

• Maslow described human needs as ordered in a prepotent hierarchy—a pressing need would need to be mostly satisfied before someone would give their attention to the next highest need. None of his published works included a visual representation of the hierarchy. The pyramidal diagram illustrating the Maslow needs hierarchy may have been created by a psychology textbook publisher as an illustrative device. This now iconic pyramid frequently depicts the spectrum of human needs, both physical and psychological, as accompaniment to articles describing Maslow's needs theory and may give the impression that the Hierarchy of Needs is a fixed and rigid sequence of progression. Yet, starting with the first publication of his theory in 1943, Maslow described human needs as being relatively fluid—with many needs being present in a person simultaneously.

• The hierarchy of human needs model suggests that human needs will only be fulfilled one level at a time.

According to Maslow's theory, when a human being ascends the levels of the hierarchy having fulfilled the needs in the hierarchy, one may eventually achieve self-actualization. Late in life, Maslow came to conclude that self-actualization was not an automatic outcome of satisfying the other human needs

3. What are the different types of needs according to Maslow?

Human needs as identified by Maslow:

• At the bottom of the hierarchy are the "Basic needs or Physiological needs" of a human being: food, water, sleep, sex, homeostasis, and excretion.
• The next level is "Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability". These two steps are important to the physical survival of the person. Once individuals have basic nutrition, shelter and safety, they attempt to accomplish more.
• The third level of need is "Love and Belonging", which are psychological needs; when individuals have taken care of themselves physically, they are ready to share themselves with others, such as with family and friends.
• The fourth level is achieved when individuals feel comfortable with what they have accomplished. This is the "Esteem" level, the need to be competent and recognized, such as through status and level of success.
• Then there is the "Cognitive" level, where individuals intellectually stimulate themselves and explore.
• After that is the "Aesthetic" level, which is the need for harmony, order and beauty.
• At the top of the pyramid, "Need for Self-actualization" occurs when individuals reach a state of harmony and understanding because they are engaged in achieving their full potential. Once a person has reached the self-actualization state they focus on themselves and try to build their own image. They may look at this in terms of feelings such as self-confidence or by accomplishing a set goal.

4. What does metapathology and metamotivation mean?

• While wholeness is a B-balue, disintegration is the metapathology. While playfulness is a B-value, grimness, depression, loss of zest in life are metapathologies. NEUROSIS is a deficiency need that implies ungratified wishes for safety, love, belongingness, esteem, etc.
• Metamotivation is a term coined by Abraham Maslow to describe the motivation of people who are self-actualized and striving beyond the scope of their basic needs to reach their full potential.