The humanistic approach is thus often called the “third force” in psychology after psychoanalysis and behaviorism (Maslow, 1968). A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image. Like all other carbon-based living organisms on planet Earth, human beings are staying alive machines. (Admit it; you instantly thought of the Bee Gees, didn’t you, or John Travolta in that white bell-bottom suit?) I’m not saying there is no meaning to life. Quite the contrary; I’m saying that the function of life is to be alive, to stay alive, and to perpetuate life. What’s the meaning of it all? Wrong book; try Philosophy For Dummies or Religion For Dummies. Is psychology right about people? It may or may not be, but in an attempt to live up to that challenge, psychology uses the standards of science to do so, and if conducting and practicing psychological science lends itself to some use, exposes someone to one new idea or way of thinking, and helps just one person live a better life, then it has served a valuable role in the world. It is not privileged per se. It cannot explain everything about being human. Come on, that would just pompous and downright impossible. Behavior is not constrained by either past experience of the individual or current circumstances (determinism).

pt_webextra_bw.TIF For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more. Evolutionary psychology searches for the causes and explanations for mental processes and behavior through the lens of adaptive fitness and natural selection. The basic idea is that mental processes and behaviors are the product of the selection through mating for processes and behaviors that helped solve recurring problems facing humans across large swathes of time. Whereas developmental approaches emphasize change over the lifespan of an individual, evolutionary psychology emphasizes change over generations. Traits that were particularly helpful for survival, such as problem-solving and cooperating with others were kept and passed on to subsequent generations. Mental process or behavior that led to a person living long enough to pass on his or her genes stayed in the gene pool. Those that did not were dropped from the gene pool. Additionally, there is a branch of psychology known as comparative psychology that studies animal behavior as an analog for human behavior. Studying animals can help us understand humans, and evolutionary psychology is the foundation of and justification for this approach. Humanistic and existential Studying a person’s subjective experience is the biggest problem for scientific psychology, which stresses the need for its subject matter to be publicly observable and verifiable. Subjective experience, by definition, resists such processes. In this section, I describe the most common metatheories psychologists use when they find a behavior or mental process they’re interested in researching. Work typically begins from within one of these theories. Biological The biological approach centers on the biological underpinnings of behavior, including the effects of evolution and genetics. The premise is that behavior and mental processes can be explained by understanding genetics, human physiology, and anatomy. Biological psychologists focus mostly on the brain and the nervous system. (For more on biological psychology, see Chapter 3.) Neuropsychology and the study of the brain, genetics, and evolutionary psychology are included within the biological metatheory.The humanistic approach has been applied to relatively few areas of psychology compared to the other approaches. Therefore, its contributions are limited to areas such as therapy, abnormality, motivation, education, and personality. In therapy, when people try to explain a particular behavior or situation to me, I often say, Can you make it happen, now? Can you show me? For example, a parent may be telling me how his child hits him when he tells the child to do something. And I’ll say, Show me. Make it happen. The most common response is a puzzled or disturbed look on the parent’s face. Remember The basic idea behind this model is that human behavior and mental processes are the products of biological, psychological, and social influences. Biopsychosocialists try to find out how these influences interact to produce behavior. They believe that any explanation of behavior and mental processes that doesn’t consider all three primary factors (body, mind, and environment) is incomplete. Feeling out the role of the body

It offered a new set of values for approaching an understanding of human nature and the human condition. So you’ve bought Psychology For Dummies. How does that make you feel? I hope you’re feeling pretty good. And why shouldn’t you be? You’re going to discover all kinds of interesting information about the basics of human mental processes and behavior.Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Free will is the idea that people can make choices in how they act and are self-determining. When I try to imagine all the reasons that people do what they do and figure out how various behaviors and mental processes come to pass, I often run with a mad-scientist approach. I’ve always thought that one of the best ways to answer the what and why and how questions would be to build a person. Well, not actually build one like Dr. Frankenstein did — out of parts and brains and electricity — but to create a blueprint of a person’s mind and behavior. Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down, and their consequences. Individuals are free to choose when they are congruent (Rogers) or self-actualized (Maslow).

I’m a psychologist. But what’s that? Someone who knows and studies psychology, but is that all there is to it? When I get together with family and friends during the holidays, it seems like they still don’t know exactly what I do for a living. Humanistic psychology is a perspective that emphasizes looking at the the whole person, and the uniqueness of each individual. Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumptions that people have free will and are motivated to acheive their potential and self-actualize.

Science represents a protracted attempt to contribute to a public edifice of knowledge founded on probabilistic evidence that the piecemeal construction achieves some important similarities with reality. No one sincerely believes that his or her single experiment will answer any useful question once and for all… .

According to Rogers, people could only self-actualize if they had a positive view of themselves (positive self-regard). This can only happen if they have unconditional positive regard from others – if they feel that they are valued and respected without reservation by those around them (especially their parents when they were children). Remember We’re all psychologists really. Some of us just happen to be professional psychologists. The difference between a professional psychologist and a non-professional psychologist is really a matter of degree (get it?), separated by focus, time spent, materials consumed, and methods used. Over the years, I have been asked (sometimes respectfully and nicely, sometimes not) these questions: What makes you better at this than me? What do you know that I don’t? Well, I believe it’s really a matter of degree, perspective, and the psychologist tools I use to see and do the psychologist thing. Professionals in any field seem to immerse themselves in it. Again, it's a matter of degree. We all occupy the space of a psychologist to one degree or another. Psychologists just spend more time engaged in conscious and deliberate effort to stay in that space and look at the world from that viewpoint. We spend our time and careers occupying that space and doing the psychologist thing, occasionally coming out of the trance to share what we have seen, think, and found to be objectively true, at least as far as science allows us. But ultimately, psychology is only one way of looking at people and the world they interact with. Psychology began as a type of philosophy, a mostly subjective, speculative, and theoretical way of thinking about human beings. But, as a result of the enormous contributions of such people as William James, Wilhem Wundt, Edward Thorndike, B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, Jean Piaget, Phillip Zimbardo, Robert Sternberg, Albert Ellis, and many, many others, it has matured over the last 100 years into an objective science. Psychology’s experimentation methods and statistical analyses continue to grow increasingly sophisticated. Tattoos and body piercings are good examples of this power. At one point in mainstream culture, people who got ink and piercings were perceived to be acting outside of the status quo, so status quo people weren’t lined up outside the tattoo or piercing parlor. Nowadays, both are widely accepted, and even Mr. Status Quo may have a tat or piercing (or two or three). Developmental For an example of biology’s impact on behavior, just think about how differently people act when they’re under the influence of alcohol. Holiday office parties are good laboratories for applying the biological perspective. You walk into the party and see Bob, the relatively quiet guy from accounting, burning up the cubicles. Bob’s transformed into a lady’s man. He’s funny. He’s drunk. Do you think Bob will remember? Behaviorism