2.4 Humanist, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Psychology

Humanistic psychology emerged as the third force in psychology after psychodynamic and behaviourist psychology. Humanistic psychology holds a hopeful, constructive view of human beings and of their substantial capacity to be self-determining. This wave of psychology is guided by a conviction that intentionality and ethical values are the key psychological forces determining human behaviour. Humanistic psychologists strive to enhance the human qualities of choice, creativity, the interaction of the body, mind, and spirit, and the capacity to become more aware, free, responsible, life-affirming, and trustworthy.

Emerging in the late 1950s, humanistic psychology began as a reaction against the two schools of thought then dominating American psychology. Behaviourism’s insistence on applying the methods of physical science to human behaviour caused adherents to neglect crucial subjective data, humanists believed. Similarly, psychoanalysis’s emphasis on unconscious drives relegated the conscious mind to relative unimportance.

The early humanistic psychologists sought to restore the importance of consciousness and offer a more holistic view of human life. Humanistic psychology acknowledges that the mind is strongly influenced by determining forces in society and the unconscious, and emphasizes the conscious capacity of individuals to develop personal competence and self-respect. The humanistic orientation has led to the development of therapies to facilitate personal and interpersonal skills and to enhance the quality of life. During the 1950s and 1960s, Carl Rogers, for instance, introduced what he called person or client-centred therapy, which relies on clients’ capacity for self-direction, empathy, and acceptance to promote clients’ development. Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) developed a hierarchy of motivation or hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualization. Rollo May (1909 – 1994) brought European existential psychotherapy and phenomenology into the field by acknowledging human choice and the tragic aspects of human existence, and Fritz Perls developed gestalt therapy in his workshops and training programs at the Esalan Institute and elsewhere.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the ideas and values of humanistic psychology spread into many areas of society. As a result, humanistic psychology has many branches and extensions, as outlined in Table 2.2.

Client-centred therapy provides a supportive environment in which clients can re-establish their true identity. Central to this thinking is the idea that the world is judgmental, and many people fear that if they share with the world their true identity, it would judge them relentlessly. People tend to suppress their beliefs, values, or opinions because they are not supported, not socially acceptable, or negatively judged. To re-establish a client’s true identity, the therapist relies on the techniques of unconditional positive regard and empathy. These two techniques are central to client-centred therapy because they build trust between the client and therapist by creating a nonjudgmental and supportive environment for the client.

Existential therapy contrasts the psychoanalysts’ focus on the self and focuses instead on “man in the world.” The counsellor and the client may reflect on how the client has answered life’s questions in the past, but attention ultimately emphasizes the choices to be made in the present and future and enabling a new freedom and responsibility to act. By accepting limitations and mortality, a client can overcome anxieties and instead view life as moments in which he or she is fundamentally free.

Gestalt therapy focuses on the skills and techniques that permit an individual to be more aware of their feelings. According to this approach, it is much more important to understand what patients are feeling and how they are feeling rather than to identify what is causing their feelings. Supporters of gestalt therapy argued that earlier theories spent an unnecessary amount of time making assumptions about what causes behaviour. Instead, gestalt therapy focuses on the here and now.

Humanistic psychology recognizes that human existence consists of multiple layers of reality: the physical, the organic, and the symbolic. It contests the idea — traditionally held by the behavioural sciences — that the only legitimate research method is an experimental test using quantitative data. It argues for the use of additional methods specifically designed to study qualitative factors such as subjective experience, emotion, perception, memory, values, and beliefs. Whereas other approaches take an objective view of people — in essence asking, What is this person like? — humanistic psychologists give priority to understanding people’s subjectivity, asking, What is it like to be this person? (Clay, 2002).

Humanistic psychology has, of course, quietly influenced North American psychology and culture over many decades by informing the civil rights debate and the women’s rights movement, for example. In the academic world, however, humanistic psychology’s rejection of quantitative research in favour of qualitative methods caused its reputation to suffer and its adherents to be marginalized. But in recent years, there’s mounting evidence of renewal in the field itself.

Abraham Maslow’s view of human needs was more complex than Rogers’s. While Rogers believed that people needed unconditional positive regard, Maslow acknowledged that people have a variety of needs that differ in timing and priority (Figure 2.15).

Maslow called the bottom four levels of the pyramid deficiency needs because a person does not feel anything if they are met, but becomes anxious if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and sexual intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem and recognition. In contrast, Maslow called the fifth level of the pyramid a growth need^[2] because it enables a person to self-actualize or reach his or her fullest potential as a human being. Once a person has met the deficiency needs, he or she can attend to self-actualization; however, only a small minority of people are able to self-actualize because self-actualization requires uncommon qualities such as honesty, independence, awareness, objectivity, creativity, and originality.

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management principles of the early 1900s, born of the industrial revolution and focused on scientific study of productivity in the workplace, fostered the development of motivation theory, which held that all work consisted largely of simple, uninteresting tasks, and that the only viable method to get people to undertake these tasks was to provide incentives and monitor them carefully. In order to get as much productivity out of workers as possible, it was believed that a person must reward the desired behaviour and punish the rejected behaviour — otherwise known as the “carrot-and-stick” approach.

During this time, scientists believed in two main drives powering human behaviour: the biological drive, including hunger, thirst, and intimacy; and the reward-punishment drive. However, scientists began to encounter situations during their experiments where the reward-punishment drive wasn’t producing the expected performance results. In 1949, Harry F. Harlow, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, began to argue for a third drive: intrinsic motivation — the joy of the task itself.

Harlow’s theory (1950) was based on studies of primate behaviour when solving puzzles. He found that when presented with a puzzle, monkeys seemed to enjoy solving the puzzles without the presence or expectation of rewards. He found these monkeys, driven by intrinsic motivation, solved the puzzles quicker and more accurately than monkeys that received food rewards.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985) went on to explore and replicate these findings with humans many times over in their studies of families, classrooms, teams, organizations, clinics, and cultures. They concluded that conditions supporting the individual’s experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness foster the greatest motivation for and engagement in activities while enhancing performance, persistence, and creativity.

Dan Pink (2010) provides ample evidence to support the notion that a traditional carrot-and-stick approach can result in:

• Diminished intrinsic motivation (the third drive)
• Lower performance
• Less creativity
• Crowding out of good behaviour
• Unethical behaviour
• Addictions
• Short-term thinking

Humanistic psychology gave birth to the self-help movement, with concepts grounded in emotion and intuition. The recent positive psychology movement is one form of neo-humanistic psychology that combines emotion and intuition with reason and research. Similarly, modern crisis counselling’s emphasis on empathetic listening finds its roots in Rogers’s humanistic psychology work. In the wider culture, the growing popularity of personal and executive coaching also points to humanistic psychology’s success. Humanistic psychology’s principles may become increasingly relevant as the nation ages, creating a culture preoccupied with facing death and finding meaning in life.

In 1998, a paradigm shift in thinking occurred when University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association (APA), urged psychology to “turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage” (1998b). Though not denying humanity’s flaws, the new approach suggested by positive psychologists recommends focusing on people’s strengths and virtues as a point of departure. Rather than analyze the psychopathology underlying alcoholism, for example, positive psychologists might study the resilience of those who have managed a successful recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of viewing religion as a delusion and a crutch, as did Freud, they might identify the mechanisms through which a spiritual practice like meditation enhances mental and physical health. Their lab experiments might seek to define not the conditions that induce depraved behaviour, but those that foster generosity, courage, creativity, and laughter.

Seligman developed the concepts of learned optimism (1998a) and authentic happiness (2002). Learned optimism follows an ABCDE model:

• A=Adversity
• B=Belief
• C=Consequence
• D=Disputation
• E=Energization

In this model, when faced with adversity (A) such as a criticism or failure, a person might form the belief (B) that he or she is underperforming or incapable, and consider the consequence (C) of quitting. However, disputation (D) would challenge the underlying assumptions or beliefs that have formed. The person would then form a new belief in his or her capacity to grow from the critique or learn from the failure. From there, the person would become energized (E) as he or she pursues a new performance path.

In collaboration with Seligman, and within the positive psychology framework, Dr. Mihalyi Csikszentmihályi from Claremont University developed the theory of flow (1988; 1990). Flow is a state of optimal performance. A flow state can be entered while performing any activity, although it is most likely to occur when a person is wholeheartedly performing a task or activity for intrinsic purposes. Csikszentmihályi identified the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow:

1. Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. Merging of action and awareness
3. Loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. Sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. Distortion of temporal experience (i.e., a person’s subjective experience of time being altered)
6. Experience of the activity being intrinsically rewarding (also referred to as an autotelic experience)

Flow theory suggests that three conditions have to be met to achieve a flow state. First, a person must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task. Second, the task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust performance to maintain the flow state. And last, a person must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. The person must have confidence in his or her ability to complete the task at hand (Figure 2.16).

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as attention, memory, perception, language use, problem solving, creativity, and thinking. Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines of psychological study including social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and economics.

Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) is credited with formally coining the term cognitive psychology and defining it as “all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” (1967, page 4). Cognition came to be seen as involved in everything a human being might possibly do: every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. Theories of cognition include developmental, cultural, neural, computational, and moral perspectives.

While behaviourism and cognitive schools of psychological thought may not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in practical therapeutic applications, such as in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) that has demonstrable utility in treating certain pathologies, such as simple phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addiction. CBT replaces maladaptive strategies with more adaptive ones by challenging ways of thinking and reacting. CBT techniques focus on helping individuals challenge their patterns and beliefs and replace erroneous thinking, such as overgeneralizing, magnifying negatives, or catastrophizing, with more realistic and effective thoughts, thus decreasing self-defeating emotions and behaviour and breaking what can otherwise become a negative cycle. These errors in thinking are known as “cognitive distortions.” CBT helps individuals take a more open, mindful, and aware posture toward their distorted thoughts and feelings so as to diminish their impact (Hayes, Villatte, Levin, & Hildebrandt, 2011).

Attention

The psychological definition of attention is a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information. The key function of attention is to filter out irrelevant data, enabling the desired data to be distributed to the other mental processes. The human brain may, at times, simultaneously receive inputs in the form of auditory, visual, olfactory, taste, and tactile information. Without the ability to filter out some or most of that simultaneous information and focus on one or typically two inputs at most, the brain would become overloaded as a person attempted to process all the information.

Memory

Modern conceptions of memory typically break it down into three main subclasses:

1. Procedural memory: memory for the performance of particular types of action, is often activated on a subconscious level, or at most requires a minimal amount of conscious effort (e.g., driving to work along the same route).
2. Semantic memory: the encyclopedic knowledge that a person possesses, such as what the Eiffel Tower looks like, or the name of a friend from Grade 6.
3. Episodic memory: memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated, contains all memories that are temporal in nature, such as when you last brushed your teeth, or where you were when you heard about a major news event.

Perception

Perception involves both the physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, and proprioception) as well as the cognitive processes involved in selecting and interpreting those senses. It is how people come to understand the world around them through interpretation of stimuli.

Language use

Cognitive psychologists began exploring the cognitive processes involved with language in the 1870s when Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) proposed a model for the mental processing of language (1875/1995). Significant work has been done recently on understanding the timing of language acquisition and how it can be used to determine if a child has, or is at risk of developing, a learning disability.

Problem solving

Metacognition involves conscious thought about thought processes and might include monitoring a person’s performance on a given task, understanding a person’s capabilities on particular mental tasks, or observing a person’s ability to apply cognitive strategies. Much of the current study regarding metacognition within the field of cognitive psychology deals with its application within the area of education. Educators strive to increase students’ metacognitive abilities in order to enhance their learning, study habits, goal setting, and self-regulation.

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology has emerged as a major perspective in psychology. It seeks to develop and understand ways of expanding the emotional connection between individuals and the natural world, thereby assisting individuals with developing sustainable lifestyles and remedying alienation from nature. The main premise of evolutionary psychology is that while today the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it is adapted to the natural environment in which it evolved. According to the hypothesis of biologist E.O. Wilson, human beings have an innate instinct to connect emotionally with nature. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations — products of natural selection — that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive, and reproduce. Evolutionary psychology is founded on several core premises:

• The brain is an information-processing device, and it produces behaviour in response to external and internal inputs.
• The brain’s adaptive mechanisms were shaped by natural selection.
• Different neural mechanisms are specialized for solving problems in humanity’s evolutionary past.
• The brain has evolved specialized neural mechanisms that were designed for solving problems that recurred over deep evolutionary time, giving modern humans stone-age minds.
• Most contents and processes of the brain are unconscious; and most mental problems that seem easy to solve are actually extremely difficult problems that are solved unconsciously by complicated neural mechanisms.
• Human psychology consists of many specialized mechanisms, each sensitive to different classes of information or inputs. These mechanisms combine to produce manifest behaviour.

Evolutionary psychologists sometimes present their approach as potentially unifying, or providing a foundation for, all other work that aims to explain human behaviour (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This claim has been met with skepticism by many social scientists who see a role for multiple types of explanation of human behaviour, some of which are not reducible to biological explanations of any sort.

Image Attributions

Figure 2.15: Diagram of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. by J. Finkelstein (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs.png) used under CC BY SA 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).

Figure 2.16: Challenge vs skill Commons by Dr. enh (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill_Commons.jpg) is in the public domain.

References

Clay, Rebecca A. (2002). A renaissance for humanistic psychology. American Psychological Association Monitor, 33 (8), 42.

Csikszentmihályi, M. (1988). The flow experience and its significance for human psychology, in Csikszentmihályi, M., (Ed.) Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page. 15–35.

Csikszentmihályi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.

Glucksberg, S., & Cowen, C. N., Jr. (1970). Memory for nonattended auditory material. Cognitive Psychology, I, 149-156.

Harlow, H.F. (1950). Early social deprivation and later behavior in the monkey. page. 154-173. In A.Abrams, H.H. Gurner & J.E.P. Tomal, (Eds.), Unfinished tasks in the behavioral sciences (1964). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.

Hayes, Steven C., Villatte, Matthieu, Levin, Michael, & Hildebrandt, Mikaela. (2011). Open, aware, and active: Contextual approaches as an emerging trend in the behavioral and cognitive therapies. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7, 141–168.

Mayo, Elton (1945). Social problems of an industrial civilization. Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, page 64.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Pink, Daniel H. (2010). Drive – The surprising truth about what motivates us. Edinburgh, UK: Canongate Books.

Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist, 1, 415-422.

Seligman, M. E. P. (1998a). Building human strength: Psychology’s forgotten mission. APA Monitor, 29(1).

Seligman, M.E.P. (1998b). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. Second edition. New York: Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster).

Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. New York: Free Press.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In H. Barkow, L. Cosmides & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind, New York: Oxford University Press, page 19–136.

Wernicke, K. (1875/1995). The aphasia symptom-complex: A psychological study on an anatomical basis. In Paul Eling (Ed.) Reader in the history of aphasia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub Co. page 69–89.

Long Descriptions

Figure 2.12 long description: In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are five levels.

1. Physiological needs: Breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.
2. Safety needs: Security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property.
3. Long and belonging needs: Friendship, family, sexual intimacy.
4. Esteem needs: Self-esteem, confidence, chievement, respect of others, respect by others.
5. Self-Actualization: Morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts.

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