Being an honors student and neurotic overachiever for about as long as I can remember, I’m fascinated with the concept of motivation. For me, this has never been an issue as I find myself naturally putting a great deal of effort into all of my assignments and profusely studying in order to maintain my grades. What I’m interested in is what motivates human behavior. What drives someone to keep up diligently to shoot for that A in a class while another slacks off and simply doesn’t mind earning a C? To my relief, this is thoroughly discussed in the psychological community. Today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite theories in psychology—Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

According to a humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, human actions are motivated in order achieve certain needs. He was interesting in discovering what brings people happiness and the things they do to achieve their aims of happiness. Maslow introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Essentially, the hierarchy suggests that people are first motivated to fulfill basic needs before they can more onto more complex, advanced needs.  A central belief to his theory was that people are born with the desire to self-actualize—meaning they want to be all they can be. Before reaching the ultimate goal of self-actualization, however, people must meet their most basic needs such as food, safety, love, and self-esteem.

As you can see above, Maslow’s hierarchy is most easily understood displayed as a pyramid. The lower levels of the pyramid display a person’s most basic needs, and the complex, harder to achieve needs are towards the top. There are five different levels:

Physiological Needs: These include everything essential for survival. Basically food, water, air and sleep. These needs are instinctive and all other needs are secondary until these primary physiological needs are reached.

Security Needs: They consist of the need for security and safety. Security needs are also critical for survival, but to a lesser extent than physiological needs. Examples include shelter from the environment, employment, a safe living environment, and health care.

Social Needs: Humans are naturally social animals. This means we thrive from interaction, belonging, love, and affection. Friendships, romantic attachments, and family relationships all fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance.

Esteem Needs: Esteem needs include the need for things that reflect on personal worth, self-esteem, social recognition, and accomplishment.

Self-Actualization: People who reach this ultimate need realize their personal potential and self-fulfillment, and they seek personal growth and peak experiences. Self-actualization is when a person essentially finds a meaning in life that is important to them. These people are fully aware of their potential and know exactly what they are capable of. While self-actualization might mean creating works of art or writing a novel for some, it could be excelling in a sport, the classroom, or even your career.

Really, self actualization is all about reaching one’s full potential. I feel like ending my final blog post of RCL on this note would be rather appropriate. Through both semesters of blogging in this class, I’ve learned a substantial amount about my fellow bloggers. From reading everyone’s various blogs each week and hearing various perspectives on different topics, I’ve realized that every single individual in this has something important to contribute. To everyone who has followed my blogs and commented on them (even though we had to), thank you. Your comments really made my friday afternoons. As freshman year is drawing to a close, I wish everyone the best of luck in their future here at Penn State, and I’m positive you all will go on to achieve great things (like reaching self-actualization?!). Stay psyched section twenty two.

Sources:

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm

Last week I touched on the notion of work-family conflict and how family issues disproportionally affect women more than men. I also mentioned the demanding nature the of high power executive positions that make it especially difficult for women to get into. For my final post this week I want to continue exploring why females are having trouble getting ahead in male-dominated workplaces as well as matters of policy that perpetuate women in the struggle of getting to the top.

First I want to address a conundrum that has mystified both myself and social scientists examining the workplace. Why are women who display assertive leadership characteristics continuously written off as bossy or bitchy while their male counterparts are praised for taking charge? Time and time again any female who takes charge and demonstrates her ability to lead is ridiculed for being too bossy and aggressive. Females are often disliked and criticized for exerting these behaviors than men are expected to practice. Unfortunately, the word bossy often carries a negative and female connotation. This comes from deep rooted stereotypes about gender—boys should be opinionated, assertive and confident while girls should be submissive, kind, and compassionate. Many women might be less direct when delivering harsh feedback and skeptical about speaking up in meetings in fear of being labeled as bossy. This gives reason to supervisors to pass them over in favor of more assertive male colleagues.

In the workplace, far too many women confront this issue. Should they compete with their male colleagues and assertively duke it out in the conference room over project ideas or rather convey their ideas more subtly and agreeable? This begs the another overarching question: should women “man up” at the office or does the office need to “man down?” The answer is somewhere in the middle.

This current mentality needs to change if we’re going to reduce the gender and wage gaps. Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto Software, commented that “When women are being called bossy twice as often as men, it means that as a society we do not accept women as leaders.” Parsons makes a compelling point. If we perpetuate and play into these gender biases, the double standard in leadership styles will continue to be accepted and women will continue having a hard time getting into better positions.

Likewise, there are other matters of policy that play a role in gender inequality in the workplace. Perhaps one of our nations most archaic policies is that surrounding maternity leave. The United States is the only developed country that still doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. The current guidelines, described by the Family and Medical Leave Act, grants 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave each year to full time workers at companies with 50 or more employees. This means that if you work part time, in a small business, or as a contract worker, you’re out of luck completely. There are far too many problems with this system, namely the primary one being that it enables pregnancy to severely hinder a woman’s career. If her company doesn’t guarantee her leave, she’s at a high risk for losing her job. Unfortunately this is the case for thousands of women a year, despite the fact firing and employee because she’s pregnant is illegal. Companies often get around the Pregnancy Discrimination Act by citing other reasons for the termination, and discrimination can be hard to prove in court.

Really, it seems outrageous that our nation has yet to pass effective and much needed policies that impact the careers of roughly fifty percent of the work force. Systematically the United States’ horrendous maternity leave policy is directly affecting the amount of women in the work force and might be partially responsible for the reason we don’t see so many women in executive positions. Rather than continue with their flourishing career in the prime of their lives, many women start families and will, in turn, have to take time off or possibly leave their companies if they’re not eligible for the maternity leave they need to recover from childbirth.

Ultimately until we reform our overall mindset of females in the workplace as well as the existing maternity leave policies, this nation will continue suffering from gender inequality in the workplace.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-01-28/maternity-leave-u-s-policies-still-fail-workers

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/03/-sp-america-only-developed-country-paid-maternity-leave

http://www.workplacebullying.org/2014/03/10/bossy/

Stop scrolling, close your eyes, and think for a few moments about the following question: what comes to mind when you think of therapy or psychology? Chances are, images of dark leather couches, ink blots, and probing questions about your childhood and unconscious desires are now floating among your thoughts. For most people, many of their conceptions of psychology come from the ideas and theories of one man—Sigmund Freud. And this is rightfully so considering the sheer legacy Freud has left in the psychological community. His ideas have gone beyond the psychology classroom and saturated Western culture to the point where some of our most common expressions come from his work: arrested development, phallic symbols, defense mechanisms, mommy and daddy issues, death wishes, the unconscious, and of course, Freudian slips.

Time Magazine called him one of the most important thinkers of the last century (2001). A 2006 Newsweek article referred to him as “history’s most debunked doctor. ”John Kihlstrom, psychologist and Freud critic even comments, “More than Einstein or Watson and Crick, more than Hitler or Lenin, Roosevelt or Kennedy, more than Picasso, Eliot…Freud’s influence on modern culture has been profound and long-lasting.” I wouldn’t venture that far, but nonetheless Sigmund Freud made a profound impact. An impact great enough that an entire school of thought, Psychoanalysis, emerged from his work.

Freud believed people could be helped by bringing their unconscious thoughts and motivations into their consciousness. He reasoned that the human psyche could be divided into three parts— the id, the ego, and the superego—which essentially caused and dealt with impulses and morality. These ideas about the different parts of the psyche are not really accepted anymore, however, they did influence future psychologists to explore different models of consciousness. His school of thought emphasized the influence of the unconscious mind on one’s behavior. This concept was central to many of his beliefs because he argued that the majority of the emotions and impulses we have take place in the unconscious which is unknown to us in our conscious mind. Accordingly, he developed a set of defense mechanisms that the mind employs to mediate the different parts of the psyche.

• Displacement: “i.e. arguing with your partner after an argument with a friend”
• Projection: “ i.e. Stating that the other person is stupid when you’re losing the argument”
• Sublimation: “i.e. Becoming a boxer so that you can hit others in a more socially acceptable way”
• Denial: “i.e. Denying that your husband is having an affair and carrying on as usual”
• Repression: “i.e. Forgetting something happened because it is too emotionally painful”

Source: (http://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/freuds-main-theories-psychoanalysis.htm)

These defense mechanisms still hold relevance today as most of us engage in projection and denial on a fairly regular basis.

Additionally, Freud developed a theory on psychosexual development (which does not hold much weight/validity in modern psychology) which postulated that children move through a serious of stages as they mature involving erogenous zones (Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital). This is where the term “penis envy” comes from. However, psychosexual development is a far more complex conversation for another day involving Freud’s utterly wrong and fairly sexist 20th century conceptions about gender.

Although many parts of Freud’s theories do not still hold true today and lack empirical evidence, his work holds central to our most basic understanding of counseling and psychology. His ideas radically transformed how people thought about the human mind in the 1900’s. For that—he’s rightfully earned his place as one of the greatest thinkers in history.

http://io9.com/why-freud-still-matters-when-he-was-wrong-about-almost-1055800815

http://www.simplypsychology.org/psychoanalysis.html