FULLY FUNCTIONING PERSON

Roger’s theory of personality centers on the concept of the self, a flexible and changing perception of personal identity that emerges from the phenomenal field. The phenomenal field is the person’s total subjective experience of reality. For Rogers self means an organized cognitive structure based on our experience or our own being. The term self has two distinct sets of meanings. One set has to do with people’s attitudes about themselves; their picture of the way they took and act; the impact they believe they have on others; and their perceived traits, abilities, foibles and weakness. The collection constitutes what is known as the self concept or self image. Apart for this, there is an ideal self for each person. Ideal self means a dynamic changing construct which represents a person’s goals and aspirations. It is the self the person would like to be. The real self or true self of the person is what the person really is. A fit between one’s self concept, ideal self and true self is known as congruence.
Congruence will make a person to be fully functioning. The fully functioning person is one who has achieved openness to feelings and experiences and has learned to trust inner urges and intuitions. Rogers believed that this attitude is most likely to occur when a person receives ample amounts of love and acceptance from others.Information or feelings inconsistent with the self image are said to be incongruent. Experiences that are seriously incongruent with the self image can be threatening. Blocking, denying, or distorting experiences prevents the self from changing and creates a gulf between self image and reality. As the self image grows more unrealistic, the incongruent person becomes confused, vulnerable, dissatisfied, or seriously maladjusted.

MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Abraham Maslow’s concept of needs hierarchy is one of the most influential theories in humanistic school of thought. Maslow asserted that behaviour is motivated by the conscious desire for personal growth. He believed that we are separated from lower animals by our capacity for self-actualization.
Maslow (1970) organized human needs into a hierarchy, from physiological needs such as hunger and thirst through self-actualization. His theory regarding the hierarchy of needs consists of the following.
1. Physiological needs: hunger, thirst, elimination, warmth, fatigue, pain avoidance, sexual release.
2. Safety needs: protection from the environment through housing and clothing, security from crime and financial hardship.
3. Love and belongingness needs: love and acceptance through intimate relationships, social groups and friends.
4. Esteem needs: achievements, competence, approval, recognition, prestige, status.5. Self actualization: fulfillment of our unique potentials. It involves needs for cognitive understanding (novelty, exploration, knowledge) and aesthetic needs (music, art, poetry, beauty, order).

LATENT LEARNING

Latent learning is a form of learning that is not immediately expressed in an overt response. It occurs without obvious reinforcement to be applied later.
Latent learning is when an organism learns something in its life, but the knowledge is not immediately expressed. It remains dormant and may not be available to consciousness, until specific events or experiences might need this knowledge to be demonstrated. For instance, a child may observe a parent setting a table or tightening a screw, but does not act on this learning for a year, and then he finds he knows how to do these.

It was Tolman & Honzik (1950) who showed that rats learn about their environment in the absence of reinforcement. Tolman trained some rats to run through mazes for standard food goals. Other rats were permitted to explore the same mazes for several days without food goals or other rewards. After the unrewarded rats had been allowed to explore the mazes for 10 days, food rewards were placed in a box at the far end of the maze. The previously unrewarded explorers reached the food box as quickly as the rewarded rats after only one or two reinforced trials. Tolman concluded that rats learned about mazes in which they roamed even when they were unrewarded for doing so. He distinguished between learning and performance. Rats would acquire a cognitive map of a maze, and even though they would not be motivated to follow an efficient route to the far end, they would learn rapid routs from end to end just by roaming about within the maze. Yet this learning might remain hidden, or latent, until they were motivated to follow the rapid routes for food goals. Thus latent learning is learning that occurs but is not evident in behaviour until later, when conditions for its appearance are favourable.

DECISION MAKING

Decision making is the process of considering alternatives and choosing among them. Making decisions is hard work. Usually people use short cuts in performing decision making. One group of cognitive short-cuts is heuristics. Heuristics are the mental rules of thumb that permit us to make decisions and judgments in a rapid and efficient manner. There are three frequently used heuristics – availability heuristics, representative heuristics, and anchoring and adjustment heuristics. Availability heuristic is a cognitive rule of thumb in which the importance or probability of various events is judged on the basis of how readily they come to mind. Representative heuristic is the mental rule of thumb suggesting that the more closely an event or object resembles typical examples of some concept or category, the more likely it is to belong to that concept or category. Anchoring and adjustment heuristics is a cognitive rule of thumb for making decisions in which existing information is accepted as a reference point but then adjusted in light of various factors.

PROBLEM SOLVING

According to Skinner (1968), Problem Solving is a process of overcoming difficulties that appear to interfere with the attainment of a goal. It is a procedure of making adjustment in spite of interferences. If we have no ready means of achieving a goal or answering a question, then we have a problem to solve. Problem solving is a deliberate and serious act, involves the use of some novel methods, higher thinking and systematic scientific steps for the realization of the set goals. There are two aspects to the study of problem-solving behaviour. One of them is to examine the logical ways in which solutions to problems may be discovered, and to specify procedures that will help people become more effective problem solvers. The other is to discover how people actually solve problems and to understand the thought processes involved.
Problem solving may be obstructed by a mental set that leads someone to apply an inappropriate solution technique because it has worked for other problems that appear similar but are not. It can also be hampered by functional fixedness, which is the tendency to see an object as having only one use rather than several different ones. Analogical thinking allows us to solve new problems by referring to old problems with the same structure, although people often make the mistake of applying it to problems which are similar only in content. Incubation (gather information about the problem, explore its structure and then set the matter aside for a period of time) may also assist problem solving by encouraging those processes thought to be responsible for insight.
Stages of Problem Solving:
Identifying the problem: Becoming aware regarding the difficulty or problem that needs a solution
Defining and representing the problem: Defining the problem in terms of the specific goals and objectives. All the difficulties and obstacles in the path of the solution are to be properly named and identified.
Formulating a strategy: Thinking about various possibilities for the solution of the problem.
Organization of information: Collecting relevant information about the problem through all possible sources.
Resource Allocation: Finding and establishing the relevant resources to solve the problem.
Monitoring: supervising the progress towards a solution in order to detect the errors if any, in the early stage itself.Evaluation: Determining the strengths and weaknesses of the way in which the other stages were implemented.

GOALS OF COUNSELLING

The goals of counseling are to help individuals overcome their immediate problems and also equip them to meet future problems. Counselling is to be meaningful, has to be specific for each client, since it involves her/his unique problems and expectations. The goal of counseling may be described as immediate, long range and process goals. The immediate goal is however, to obtain relief for the client and the long range goal is to enhance the adaptability of the client.
Counseling goals may be classified in terms of counselor goals and client goals of therapy. These may be further classified as follows.
Developmental goals: are those where in the client is associated in meeting or advancing her or his anticipated human growth and development.
Preventive goals: are those in which the counselor helps the client avoid some undesired outcome.
Enhancement goals: If the client possesses special skills and abilities, enhancement means, they can be identified and/or further developed through the assistance of a counselor.
Remedial goals: involves assisting a client to overcome and/or treat an undesirable development.
Exploratory goals: represents goals appropriate to the examining of options, testing of skills, and trying new and different activities, environments, relationships and so on.
Reinforcement goals: are those used in the instances where clients need help in recognizing that what they are doing, thinking and feeling is okay.
Cognitive goals: are those which involve the acquisition of the basic foundations of learning and cognitive skills.
Physiological goals: are those which include acquiring the basic understanding and habits for good health.
Psychological goals: aids in developing good social interaction skills, learning emotional control, developing a positive self concept and so on.
All these goals will lead to the ultimate goals, which are discussed following.
1. Achievement of positive mental health: The individual will learn to adjust and respond more positively to people and situations, to prevent the emotional tension, anxieties, indecision etc. and thereby to lead to positive feelings and warmth.
2. Resolution of the problems: The individual will learn to alter maladaptive behaviour, to make good decisions and to prevent problems.
3. Improving personal effectiveness: The individual will be able to commit himself to projects, investigating time and energy and to take appropriate economic, psychological and physical risk.
4. Change: The individual will understand the mechanism of change, and be able to freely choose and act within the conditions impressed by the environment. The effectiveness of the individual responses evolved by the environment shall be enhanced.
5. Decision making: The individual will be able to make clear cut decisions that foster personal growth. 6. Modification of behaviour: The client will be able to remove undesirable behaviour or action, or to reduce an irritating function that hinders personal growth.

OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

Acquired new information, forms of behaviour, or even abstract rules and concepts from watching the actions of other people and the consequences they experiences is called observational learning. That is, learning by watching others. The proponent is Albert Bandura.
Steps in observational learning
1) Attend and perceive the behaviour
2) Remembering the coded behaviour
3) Converting the memory to action
4) Reinforcement of the initiated behaviour.
Observational learning is efficient and adaptive. It occurs in both animals and human. E.g. young chimpanzees learn how to use a stone to crack open nuts by watching their mothers perform this action. And there is no need of checking whether a door is locked or an iron is hot if someone else is seen trying the door or suffering a burn.Children are particularly influenced by the adults and peers who act as models for appropriate behaviour in various situations. In a classic experiment (Bandura, 1965), children watched an adult attack a large blow up Bo-Bo doll. Some children saw an adult sit on the doll, punch it, hit it with a hammer, and kick it around the room. There were different endings for the film. Some children saw an ending in which the aggressive adult was called a “champion” by another adult, and was rewarded with candy and soft drinks. Some saw that the aggressor was scolded and was called a bad person. A third group saw a neutral ending, in which there was neither reward nor punishment. After the film, each child was allowed to play alone with a Bo-Bo doll. Bandura found that children who saw the adult rewarded for aggression showed the most aggressive acts in their play. They were vicariously reinforced to imitate the aggressive actions. Those who had seen the adult punished for aggressive acts initially showed less aggression, but they still learned something.

LANGUAGE

Language is the spoken, written or gestured words and the ways these words are combined to communicate meaning.
There are five basic elements of language – phoneme, morpheme, grammar, semantics, syntax.
Phoneme in a spoken language is the smallest distinctive sound unit. Morpheme in a language is the smallest unit that carries meaning. Grammar is a system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate with others. Semantics is the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes or the combination of morphemes. Syntax is the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.
Language development in children mirrors language structure. It moves from simple to complex. There are four stages in language development in children – Babbling stage, one word stage, two word stage and telegraphic speech.
Babbling stage begins at 3 to 4 months. This is a stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the house hold language. One word stage is a stage in speech development, from about 1 to 2 during which a child speaks mostly in single words. Two-word stage begins during the age of 2. The child will learn here to speak connecting two words. Telegraphic speech is an early speech stage when the child speaks in telegraphic language. E.g. “Go car” which means let us go to car. Psycholinguistics is the discipline of Psychology that studies the mental mechanisms of language processing – speaking, listening, reading and writing in both a native and a second tongue. Psycholinguistics also studies the processes underlying the acquisition of language. Psycholinguistics borrows many of its theoretical constructs from linguistics. Levels of processing, distinguished in theories of language comprehension or language production, correspond to linguistic levels, such as semantics, the lexicon, syntax, morphology, phonology and phonetics. Psycholinguistic experiments provides information about the psychological reality of linguistic units and the way linguistic information is represented and processed in the mind of the language user.

FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS AND MENTAL SET

The tendency to think of using object only as they have been used in the past is called functional fixedness. Functional fixedness arises when people have a fixed idea of the function of an object, and is unable to see that it may have other uses which would enable them to solve the problem. People tend to see object only in terms of their customary functions. Normal functions of objects become fixed in an individual’s thought, so that he/she does not consider using them in new and creative ways.
Mental set is the tendency to apply a familiar strategy to the solution of a problem without carefully considering special requirements of that problem. A mental set can be either facilitating or inhibiting, depending upon what response the problem requires. Mental set might be determined by personality and attitudinal factors, and not by intellectual and critical thinking abilities. E.g. a child may enter a store by pushing a door open. After this, each time when the child comes to a door expecting it to open by pushing even though may doors only open by pulling. This is due to the mental set for opening the doors.

THINKING

Thinking refers to all the mental activities associated with processing, understanding and communicating (Myers, 2000).
Tools of thinking
The two major tools using in thinking process are
a) concept b) imagery
According to ‘David Myers’, concepts are the mental groupings of similar objects, events and people. Concepts provide us much information without much cognitive effort. To simplify things concepts are organized into hierarchies. In addition to that some concepts are formed by definition. E.g. On the basis of the rule that a triangle has three sides, all the three sided geometrical forms is recognized as triangles. Concepts are also formed through the development of prototypes. Prototype is a mental image or a best example that incorporates all the features associated with a category. Prototypes may include positive or negative instances. When a child sees a dog and forms the mental image, “it is a dog”, then it is a positive instance. When the child sees a goat and discriminate it forming the mental image “it is not a dog”, then it is a negative instance.
Concepts are of two types – logical and natural. Logical concepts (or formal concepts) are those which are clearly defined by a set of rules, a formal definition or a classification system. It is also called artificial concept. E.g. mathematical symbols like triangles, rectangle, square etc. Natural concepts are those acquired not from a definition, but through every-day perceptions and experience. They are somewhat fuzzy, not clear cut and systematic. Imagery is the mental representation of sensory experiences. It can be visual, auditory, gustatory, motor, olfactory or tactile. E.g. Imagination of tasting favorite ice cream is a gustatory imagery. Mental images may be dimmer and less vivid than actual experiences. Though the images are not limited to time, space or other physical realities, they used to be similar to that of the real world. Visual imagery is most common form of imagery. Imagery about performance has impact on the muscles, and the consequence is muscular imagery.