Psychosocial & Holistic-Dynamic Theories

Erik Erikson: Psychosocial Theory

• Explores aspects of the ego
• Body ego experiences as physically distinct
• Ego ideal reflects the image compared to established ideals and expectations
• Ego identity refers to social roles played

Abraham Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory

• Focuses on a hierarchy of conative needs where lower needs must be met first

Hierarchy of Needs

• Prepotency dictates lower needs activate before higher ones
• Physiological needs are the most basic and prepotent
• Safety needs must not be overly satiated, or basic anxiety arises
• Love and belongingness needs can stem from varying experiences
  • early fulfillment
  • deprivation
  • small doses
• Esteem needs include self-respect, confidence, competence, and recognition
  • Reputation comprises prestige, recognition, or fame
  • Self-esteem exceeds reputation, involving strength and achievement desire
• Self-actualization is the highest need

Additional Needs

• Aesthetic needs are non-universal for beauty and order
• Cognitive needs include knowledge, mystery-solving, and curiosity
• Neurotic needs result in stagnation and pathology

General Discussion of Needs

• Satisfaction decreases at higher levels
  • Physiological: 85%
  • Safety: 70%
  • Love and belongingness: 50%
  • Esteem: 40%
  • Self-actualization: 10%
• Lower-level need satisfaction boosts the emergence of next-level needs
• Needs emerge gradually, with motivation from multiple levels simultaneously
• The hierarchical order can occasionally reverse
• Some behavior is not need-driven:
  • Unmotivated behavior stems from reflexes, maturation, or drugs
  • Expressive behavior is an end in itself, unconscious and effortless

Coping Behavior

• Serves goals consciously or unconsciously, motivated by deficit
• It can involve both healthy need fulfillment or unhealthy stress reduction
• Avoidance or denial provide short-term safety but lack long-term solutions
• Overworking distracts but harms self-actualization

Deprivation of Basic Needs

• Physiological deprivation leads to malnutrition, fatigue, or obsession with sex
• Safety deprivation leads to fear, insecurity, or dread
• Belongingness deprivation leads to defensiveness or aggression
• Esteem deprivation leads to self-doubt or lack of confidence
• Self-actualization deprivation leads to loss of values, fulfillment, or meaning in life

Criteria for Self-Actualization

• Must lack psychopathology
• Needs must progress through the hierarchy
• Embrace B-values
• Fully utilize talents

Metamotivation

• Describes motives of self-actualizing people
• Includes 14 B-values like autonomy, aliveness, beauty, completion, etc

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People

• Efficient perception of reality to detect phoniness
• Acceptance of self, others, and nature
• Spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
• Problem-centering
• Need for privacy
• Autonomy
• Continued freshness of appreciation
• Peak experiences
• Gemeinschaftsgefuhl
• Profound interpersonal relations
• Democratic character structure
• Discrimination between means and ends
• Philosophical sense of humor
• Creativeness
• Resistance to enculturation

Carl Rogers: Person-Centered Theory

• Centers around basic assumptions

Basic assumptions

• Formative tendency of evolving from simple to complex
• Actualizing tendency is the primary motive for fulfillment
  • Maintenance is a tendency to resist change and seek the status quo
  • Enhancement is a need to develop to achieve growth
  • Conditions for growth includes congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy

Self Subsystems

• Self-concept includes perceived aspects of one's being and experiences
• Ideal self is one's desired view of self

Awareness

• Operates through symbolic representation of experience

Levels of awareness

• Ignored or denied
• Distorted experiences
• Actually symbolized experiences

Becoming a Person

• Requires contact with another person
• Involves the need for positive regard from others
• Includes valuing oneself

Psychological Health Barriers

• Conditions of worth arise from conditional acceptance
  • External evaluations shape perceptions of self
• Incongruence is a mismatch between self-concept and organismic experiences
  • Vulnerability stems from unawareness of discrepancies
  • Anxiety arises from unknown causes
  • Threat emerges with awareness of incongruence
• Defensiveness protects against incongruence
  • Denial rejects contradictory experiences
  • Distortion misinterprets experiences
• Disorganization

Rollo May: Existential Psychology

• Deals with basic concepts

Basic concepts

• Being-in-the-world is understood from one’s own perspective
  • Alienation occurs via separation from nature, lack of meaningful relations, and loss of the self
  • Modes of being include being-in-the-world
    • Umwelt is the environment around us
    • Mitwelt is the relationship with others
    • Eigenwelt is the relationship with self
• Nonbeing/nothingness is the dread of not being or fear of death
• Anxiety arises when potential struggles to meet fulfillment

Anxiety

• Normal anxiety is proportionate to threat
  • involves no repression
  • is constructive
  • is experienced by everyone when values are threatened
• Neurotic anxiety is disproportionate
  • involves repression conflicts
  • is managed by blocking
  • is experienced when values change into dogma

Guilt

• It arises from denying potential, failing to perceive needs, or ignoring dependence on nature
• Ontological guilt pertains to being and not feelings

Modes of ontological guilt include

• Umwelt for disconnection from nature
• Mitwelt for misperceiving others
• Eigenwelt for failing to fulfill potential

Separation Guilt

• Results from separation from nature
• A concept similar to Fromm’s human dilemma
• Intentionality gives meaning for future decision-making for subjects to understand what is objective
  • overcomes subject/object dichotomy

Care, Love, and Will

• Care is an active process; the opposite of apathy
• Care is a state where something matters and is a source of love and will
• To Love means to care, recognize essential humanity and value development as much as one’s own
• Will is organizing oneself to move toward goals
• Care founds love and will creating meaningful intentional relationships

Forms of Love

• Sex is biological with procreation
• Eros is psychological desire for creation via enduring union and salvation
• Philia is friendship
• Agape is esteem for others, concern and altruistic love

Freedom

• Individual's capacity that they are the determined one
• Existential Freedom is freedom to act on choices
• Essential Freedom is freedom of being

Destiny

• Describes destination, terminus, and our goal
• Psychopathology stems from apathy and emptiness more so than anxiety or guilt
• Psychotherapy makes people more human to set people free

Gordon Allport: Psychology of the Individual

• Emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual
  • Morphogenic method is gathering data on single individuals
  • Nomothetic method gather data on groups of people

Personality

• The individual behind their actions
• It contains a dynamic organization within the individual comprised of psychophysical systems
  • dynamic organization stems from interrelated integration of personality aspects
  • personality is organized, patterned, and not static
  • psychophysical emphasizes psychological and physical aspects of personality
  • determine implies action that personality influences
  • characteristic implies the individual's uniqueness
  • behavior/thought include internal thoughts and external actions.

Structure of Personality

• Contains and consists of the following basic units or building blocks
  • Personal Dispositions permit individual character description
    • Includes a generalized neuropsychic structure to equate stimuli and guide adaptive behavior
  • Common Traits provide comparison means within a culture

Personal Disposition versus Common Traits

• One being individual traits, the other being shared traits

Levels of Personal Disposition

• Cardinal disposition is rare, unique, and powerful i.e. Quixotic
• Central dispositions are core traits shaping an individual life i.e. focus
• Secondary dispositions are situation-specific i.e. appearance

Motivational versus Stylistic Dispositions

• Motivational - initiate action
• Stylistic - guide action
• Motivational dispositions mirror Maslow’s coping, while stylistic mirrors expressive behavior

Proprium

• It describes traits and behaviors regarding ones warm, central, and important lives
• Includes traits, values, and behaviors regarded as truly yourself

Motivation

• It operates through present drives rather than past
  • Peripheral motives - reduce need
  • Propiate striving - maintain tension/purpose
  • Proactive Behavior - consciously acting on the environment
  • Functional autonomy - permits growth toward psychological health

Functional Autonomy

• describes that current motives aren't always linked to the the original reasons
• four requirements of well-suited (adequate) motivator theories

Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa: Five-Factor Trait Theory

• Observations are made on individuals using factor analysis
  • Factor loadings are correlation scores
  • Unipolar traits scale from zero to large amounts
  • Oblique assumes correlation (positive or negative) and is relative to an angle

Five Factor Description

• Personality traits are bipolar
• Follow the bell curve distribution
• Neuroticism and extraversion are ubiquitous

High and Low Scores

• Describes the high and low scores of extraversion, neruoticism and openness
• Extraversion:
  • High: affectionate, joiner, talkative, fun loving, active passionate
  • Low: reserved, loner, quiet, sober, passive, unfeeling
• Neuroticism:
  • High: Anxious, temperamental, self pitying, self-conscious, emotional, and vulnerable
  • Low: Calm, even tempered, self-satisfied, comfortable, unemotional, and hardy
• Openness:
  • High: Imaginative, creative, original, prefers variety, curious and liberal.
  • Low: down-to-earth, uncreative, conventional, prefers routine, uncurious and conservative

Basic Traits

• Agreeableness, conscientiousness Agreeableness:
  • High: Softhearted, trusting gentle, acquiescent, lenient, and good-natured.
  • Low: Ruthless, suspicious, stingy, antagonistic, critical, and irritable Conscientiousness:
  • High: diligent, hardworking, well-organized, punctual and ambitious
  • Low: negligent, lazy, disorganized, late, and aimless

Five Factor Theory Core Components

• Basic tendencies consist of raw material of personality traits and dispositions that are generally inferred rather than observed
• Characteristic adaptations acquire personality structure that develops how people adapt in their environment
• Self concept consists views and evaluations ranging from personal history to coherence

Peripheral Components

• Biological bases are mechanisms influencing tendencies (hormones, genes, brain structure for example)
• Objective biography defines a lifespan of actions, thoughts, and feelings stressing their experience rather than perceptions
• External influences are opportunities and demands that shape personal interactions with the characteristics adaptations

Personality Interaction

• Biological bases influence basic traits, which in turn influences adaptations and self-concept which results in shaping one's life

Basic Postulates

• Individuality describes that adults have a unique set of traits and patterns
• Origin describes that genetics, hormones, genetics influence genetics of personality as a whole.
• Development describes traits being changed throughout childhood slowing in adolescence and nearly stopping in early adulthood
• Structure describe traits being organized from specific to broad

Traits Effect on Environment

• Plasticity entails change to environment or deliberate interventions recognizing tendencies

Hans J. Eysenck: Biologically Based Factor Theory

• Superfactors located on the fourth level of hierarchical structure
• 3General superfactors (all bipolar)
  • extraversion-introversion
  • neuroticism-stability
  • psychoticism-supergo function

Extraversion

• Principal differences lie in biology as opposed to behavior and genetics - One’s arousal creates these differences being largely inherited rather than learned
• Agreeableness and conscientiousness do not have an underlying biological association

Neuroticism

• Describes a type of diathesis stress model due to genetics and acquired weakness making some people vulnerable to stress Higher neuroticism makes it easier for reactions to occur

Psychotiscm

• independent personality factor with bipolar characteristics
• high scores being associated with egocentric, cold, impulsive, psychopathic and antisocial traits - Lower scores can display highly socialized, cooperative, caring and conforming nature
  • higher scores make one more vulnerable to stress
• Antecedents being genetic and biological alongside experimental variables

Brain Activity and Personality

• how learning/activity can come from these traits Genes affect brain activity affecting psychoticism.