Personality Psyc Paper for movie Good Will Hunting

© 2013 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved

Theories of Personality
Rogers: Person-Centered
Theory

Chapter 10

© 2013 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved

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Outline

• Overview of Person-Centered Theory
• Biography of Rogers
• Person-Centered Theory
• Psychotherapy
• The Person of Tomorrow
• Philosophy of Science

© 2013 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved

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Outline

• The Chicago Studies
• Related Research
• Critique of Rogers
• Concept of Humanity

© 2013 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved

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Overview of Person-Centered Theory

• Grew Out Experiences as a Psychotherapist
• Called for Empirical Research to Support Personality Theory
• Not Comfortable with Notion of Theory
• Never Systematically Reformulated Theory of Personality

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Biography of Rogers

• Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1902
• Fourth of six children of upper-middle class, devoutly religious parents
• Briefly attends seminary, intending to become a minister in 1924
• Turned to psychology and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1931

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Biography (cont’d)

• Influenced by Otto Rank
• Spent nearly a dozen years working as a clinician in Rochester
• Published The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child in 1939.
• Took a position at Ohio State University in 1940, where he elucidated his views on therapy
• President of American Psychological Association in 1946-1947
• Published Client-Centered Therapy in 1951
• In 1964, moves to California and helps found Center for Studies of the Person
• Died in 1987 following surgery on broken hip

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Person-Centered Theory

• Basic Assumptions
• Formative Tendency
• Actualizing Tendency
• The Self and Self-Actualization
• The Self-Concept
• The Ideal Self
• Awareness
• Levels of Awareness
• Denial of Positive Experiences
• Becoming a Person
• Barriers to Psychological Health
• Conditions of Worth
• Incongruence
• Defensiveness
• Disorganization

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Psychotherapy

• Conditions
• Counselor congruence
• Unconditional positive regard
• Empathic listening
• Process
• Stages of therapeutic change
• Theoretical explanation for therapeutic change
• Outcomes

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The Person of Tomorrow

• Psychologically healthy people are:
• More adaptable
• Open to their experiences
• Live fully in the moment
• Existential living
• Harmonious relations with others
• More Integrated (conscious and unconscious)
• Basic trust of human nature
• Greater richness in life

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Philosophy of Science

• Science begins and ends with subjective experience
• Scientists must be involved with phenomena being studied
• Scientists perceive patterns among phenomena
• Scientists communicate findings, but this communication is subjective

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The Chicago Study

• Hypotheses:

Clients will become more aware of their feelings and experiences

The gap between the real self and the ideal self will lessen as a consequence of therapy

Clients’ behavior will become more socialized, that is, more self-accepting and more accepting of others

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The Chicago Study (cont’d)

• Method
• To measure adjustment, they used the Q sort technique (congruence between real & ideal selves)
• Participants were adults who sought therapy at the University of Chicago counseling center
• Experimenters asked half the participants to wait 60 days before receiving therapy. In addition, they tested a control group of “normals” who were matched with the therapy group.

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The Chicago Study (cont’d)

• Findings
• The therapy group—but not the control group—showed a lessening of the gap between real self and ideal self

• Clients who improved during therapy—but not those rated as least improved—showed changes in social behavior, as noted by their friends

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The Chicago Study (cont’d)

• Summary of Results
• Therapy group did demonstrate growth and retained improvement during follow-up, but they did not attain the level of psychological health in the control group

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Related Research

• Self-Discrepancy Theory
• Higgins (1987)
• Real-ideal discrepancy leads to dejection-related emotions; real-ought discrepancy leads to agitation-related emotions
• Phillips & Silvia (2005)
• High self-awareness condition led to feeling negative emotion at self-discrepancies
• Wolfe & Maisto (2000)
• Real-ideal self-discrepancy and negative mood were negatively correlated with alcohol consumption
• Motivation and Pursuing one’s Goals
• Sheldon et al. (2003)
• Supports Rogers’ theory s that people do have an OVP
• Intrinsically fulfilling goals become more important over time while materialistic goals become less important

Schwartz & Waterman (2013)

• The OVP directs us toward fulfilling pursuits

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Critique of Rogers

• Rogers’ Theory Is:
• Very High on Practicality and Internal Consistency
• High on Falsifiability, Parsimony, and Organizing Knowledge
• Moderate on Generating Research

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Concept of Humanity

• Free Choice over Determinism
• Optimism over Pessimism
• Teleology over Causality
• Uniqueness over Similarity
• Conscious over Unconscious
• Social Influence over Biology