Brief Lecture Notes for Unit 13

Revised 05/08/02

This unit will be an attempt to cover everything we haven't talked about so far this semester... which is, of course, an impossibility!  Think of it as an "odds and ends" or "kitchen sink" unit that will involve a whirlwind tour of various issues related to abnormal psychology and clinical practice, as we move inexorably toward the final exam and the end of the semester.

Topic 1:  The other side of the mental health continuum

The "continuity hypothesis" that has been the major recurrent theme of this course, as you (I hope!) recall, states that there is no clear-cut dividing line between normality and abnormality.  Mental health is a continuum (not a dichotomy);   it is a normally distributed variable (bell-shaped curve), with most of us falling in the middle (most of us are moderately neurotic).  We've spent much time examining one extreme end of the distribution (more pathology than usual).  But what about the other end of the spectrum?  What about those rare individuals who are healthier than the rest of us -- what are they like?  What is the psychological ideal?  What does optimal mental health look like?  Is there a consensus among psychologists about what that is and what it means -- and is that consensus a culture-fair or culture-free one?

One thing is clear:  optimal health means much more than the absence of pathology.  It means the acquisition and utilization of attributes (such as resilience) that are in short supply.  

Take a minute to make a list of what you think a "very psychologically healthy" person would be like.  (Begin by thinking of what you are like when you are at your very best, then add characteristics that you know you don't have, but wish you did.)  Then compare your list to the lists below, drawn from the thinking of various proponents of what today would be called the "positive psychology movement" (went by different names in the past):

Gordon Allport:  The "mature person"

Carl Rogers:  The "fully functioning person"

Abraham Maslow:  The "self-actualizing person"

Erich Fromm:  The "productively oriented person"

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:  The "autotelic person"

Lawrence Kohlberg:  The "postconventional person"

A thought question:  Can you translate these characteristics into Big Five terms?  And if so, does that contradict the notion that all Big Five profiles are equally good or equally valuable?

What might promote the acquisition of characteristics similar to those above, if you agree that this is a "good" list?

Is the question even a meaningful one?  Is there one and only one "healthy" way to be, or are there as many healthy ways to be as there are people?

Topic 2:  Personality and counseling (redux)

Earlier in the semester I made some brief allusions to the relationships between the Big Five and the process of counseling, but am going to make these more explicit now:

Extraversion

Openness

Agreeableness

Conscientiousness

Negative Emotionality

If you are interested in the Big Five, be sure to click here for even more applications (scroll past the first few pages, which review the model for those who are more naive than you are).

Topic 3:  Counseling and values

Like all other human activities, counseling doesn't take place in a vacuum.  Counselors, being human beings (yes, even college professors are, contrary to popular opinion, human beings), have their own perspectives, life experiences, priorities, assumptions, biases, predilections, and values.  The challenge is to (a) become aware of what these are, (b) be honest (congruent!) with clients about what these are, (c) make sure that you are controlling them, rather than letting them (unconsciously, as in a transference reaction) control you.

How might we classify or categorize human values, to try to make point (a) more manageable?  The Schwartz value wheel is one approach.

In an extensive cross-cultural study of values, Schwartz (1992) surveyed thousands of primary and secondary school teachers in 20 countries.  (He chose teachers in part because their job is to be conveyors of cultural values to students.)  He used a correlational method to identify clusters of similar values.  Based on a comprehensive statistical analysis of the correlational results, he found that value similarities and differences can largely be explained on the basis of two orthogonal dimensions, yielding a value circumplex.  The two dimensions are:

If these dimensions sound familiar, Big Five fans, they should!  Although Schwartz' work shows no direct evidence of being influenced by the Big Five model, what his research suggests is that values are driven by two of the Big Five dimensions.  The first dimension above largely corresponds to Agreeableness (self-enhancement is like A-, self-transcendence is like A+), while the second obviously corresponds to Openness (change is like O+, conservation like O-).  This is convenient in one way, a trifle frustrating in another:

Here are sample values that fit in each quadrant of Schwartz's model.  The model doesn't imply that people of a given personality type are only driven by values in "their quadrant", but it does suggest that these should, all things being equal, be primary values for a person of that type:

Sidebar:  from a Jungian standpoint, the pole of each dimension that is not part of one's conscious self becomes part of the "shadow";  that is, these motives still exist within the personality (since they are all more or less universal), but are not consciously recognized as such.  Hence they tend to be parts of the self that one rejects or disparages, but that can govern one's behavior especially during times of stress.  (That which is unacknowledged is uncontrollable.  The truth, in contrast, sets you free.)

Interestingly, cultural differences in the prevalence of different values makes good theoretical sense as well.  More individualistic cultures tend to emphasize O+ A- values more, while more collectivist or communitarian cultures tend to emphasize O- A+ values more.  Within our own culture, we can perhaps (?) associate O+ with liberalism and O- with conservativism in a political sense, and with less certainty, might expect correlational relationships between A- and secularism, A+ and religious faith.

What does this mean for a counselor?  In general, it means that:

The moral?

I didn't add any other topics, as you can tell.

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