Unconditional positive regard is characterized by an attitude of respect and acceptance of _____.

Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, the fourth of six children born to Walter and Julia Cushing Rogers. Carl was closer to his mother than to his father who, during the early years, was often away from home working as a civil engineer. Although his illness prevented him from immediately going back to the university, it did not keep him from working: He spent a year recuperating by laboring on the farm and at a local lumberyard before eventually returning to Wisconsin. Rogers received a PhD from Columbia in 1931 after having already moved to New York to work with the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Rogers spent 12 years at Rochester, working at a job that might easily have isolated him from a successful academic career. The personal life of Carl Rogers was marked by change and openness to experience. As an adolescent, he was extremely shy, had no close friends, and was “socially incompetent in any but superficial contacts”. He was the first president of the American Association for Applied Psychology and helped bring that organization and the American Psychological Association (APA) back together. He served as president of APA for the year 1946–1947 and served as first president of the American Academy of Psychotherapists.

Person-Centered Theory
Although Rogers’s concept of humanity remained basically unchanged from the early 1940s until his death in 1987, his therapy and theory underwent several changes in name. During the early years, his approach was known as “nondirective,” an unfortunate term that remained associated with his name for far too long. Later, his approach was variously termed “client-centered,” “person-centered,” “student-centered,” “group-centered,” and “person to person.” We use the label client-centered in reference to Rogers’s therapy and the more inclusive term person-centered to refer to Rogerian personality theory.

Basic Assumptions
What are the basic assumptions of person-centered theory? Rogers postulated two broad assumptions—the formative tendency and the actualizing tendency.

Formative Tendency
Rogers (1978, 1980) believed that there is a tendency for all matter, both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler to more complex forms. For the entire universe, a creative process, rather than a disintegrative one, is in operation. Rogers called this process the formative tendency and pointed to many examples from nature. For instance, complex galaxies of stars form from a less well-organized mass; crystals such as snowflakes emerge from formless vapor; complex organisms develop from single cells; and human consciousness evolves from a primitive unconsciousness to a highly organized awareness.

Actualizing Tendency
An interrelated and more pertinent assumption is the actualizing tendency, or the tendency within all humans (and other animals and plants) to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials (Rogers, 1959, 1980). This tendency is the only motive people possess. The need to satisfy one’s hunger drive, to express deep emotions when they are felt, and to accept one’s self are all examples of the single motive of actualization. Because each person operates as one complete organism, actualization involves the whole person.

Tendencies to maintain and to enhance the organism are subsumed within the actualizing tendency. The need for maintenance is similar to the lower steps on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It includes such basic needs as food, air, and safety; but it also includes the tendency to resist change and to seek the status quo. The conservative nature of maintenance needs is expressed in people’s desire to protect their current, comfortable self-concept. People fight against new ideas; they distort experiences that do not quite fit; they find change painful and growth frightening.

Even though people have a strong desire to maintain the status quo, they are willing to learn and to change. This need to become more, to develop, and to achieve growth is called enhancement. The need for enhancing the self is seen in people’s willingness to learn things that are not immediately rewarding.

The Self and Self-Actualization
According to Rogers (1959), infants begin to develop a vague concept of self when a portion of their experience becomes personalized and differentiated in awareness as “I” or “me” experiences. Infants gradually become aware of their own identity as they learn what tastes good and what tastes bad, what feels pleasant and what does not. They then begin to evaluate experiences as positive or negative, using as a criterion the actualizing tendency. Because nourishment is a requirement for actualization, infants value food and devalue hunger. They also value sleep, fresh air, physical contact, and health because each of these is needed for actualization.

Once infants establish a rudimentary self structure, their tendency to actualize the self begins to evolve. Self-actualization is a subset of the actualization tendency and is therefore not synonymous with it. The actualization tendency refers to organismic experiences of the individual; that is, it refers to the whole person—conscious and unconscious, physiological and cognitive. On the other hand, self-actualization is the tendency to actualize the self as perceived in awareness. When the organism and the perceived self are in harmony, the two actualization tendencies are nearly identical; but when people’s organismic experiences are not in harmony with their view of self, a discrepancy exists between the actualization tendency and the self--actualization tendency.

Rogers (1959) postulated two self subsystems, the self-concept and the ideal self.

The Self-Concept
The self-concept includes all those aspects of one’s being and one’s experiences that are perceived in awareness (though not always accurately) by the individual. The self-concept is not identical with the organismic self. Portions of the organismic self may be beyond a person’s awareness or simply not owned by that person.

The Ideal Self
The second subsystem of the self is the ideal self, defined as one’s view of self as one wishes to be. The ideal self contains all those attributes, usually positive, that people aspire to possess. A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept indicates incongruence and an unhealthy personality. Psychologically healthy individuals perceive little discrepancy between their self-concept and what they ideally would like to be.

Awareness
Without awareness the self-concept and the ideal self would not exist. Rogers (1959) defined awareness as “the symbolic representation (not necessarily in verbal symbols) of some portion of our experience” (p. 198). He used the term synonymously with both consciousness and symbolization.

Levels of Awareness
First, some events are experienced below the threshold of awareness and are either ignored or denied. An ignored experience can be illustrated by a woman walking down a busy street, an activity that presents many potential stimuli, particularly of sight and sound. Because she cannot attend to all of them, many remain ignored.

Second, Rogers (1959) hypothesized that some experiences are accurately symbolized and freely admitted to the self-structure. Such experiences are both nonthreateningand consistent with the existing self-concept.

A third level of awareness involves experiences that are perceived in a distorted form. When our experience is not consistent with our view of self, we reshapeor distort the experience so that it can be assimilated into our existing self-concept.

Becoming a Person
Rogers (1959) discussed the processes necessary to becoming a person.

First, an individual must make contact—positive or negative—with another person. This contact is the minimum experience necessary for becoming a person. In order to survive, an infant must experience some contact from a parent or other caregiver. As children (or adults) become aware that another person has some measure of regard for them, they begin to value positive regard and devalue negative regard.

That is, the person develops a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person, a need that Rogers (1959) referred to as positive regard. If we perceive that others, especially significant others, care for, prize, or value us, then our need to receive positive regard is at least partially satisfied.

Positive regard is a prerequisite for positive self-regard, defined as the experience of prizing or valuing one’s self. Rogers (1959) believed that receiving positive regard from others is necessary for positive self-regard, but once positive self-regard is established, it becomes independent of the continual need to be loved.

The source of positive self-regard, then, lies in the positive regard we receive from others, but once established, it is autonomous and self-perpetuating. As Rogers (1959) stated it, the person then “becomes in a sense his [or her] own significant social

other” (p. 224).

Barriers to Psychological Health
Not everyone becomes a psychologically healthy person. Rather, most people experience conditions of worth, incongruence, defensiveness, and disorganization.

Conditions of Worth
Instead of receiving unconditional positive regard, most people receive conditions of worth; that is, they perceive that their parents, peers, or partners love and acceptthem only if they meet those people’s expectations and approval. “A condition ofworth arises when the positive regard of a significant other is conditional, when theindividual feels that in some respects he [or she] is prized and in others not” (Rogers, 1959, p. 209).

Incongruence
We have seen that the organism and the self are two separate entities that may or may not be congruent with one another. Also recall that actualization refers to the organism’s tendency to move toward fulfillment, whereas self-actualization is the desire of the perceived self to reach fulfillment. These two tendencies are sometimes at variance with one another.

Psychological disequilibrium begins when we fail to recognize our organismic experiences as self-experiences: that is, when we do not accurately symbolize organismic experiences into awareness because they appear to be inconsistent with our emerging self-concept. This incongruence between our self-concept and our organ ismic experience is the source of psychological disorders. Conditions of worth that we received during early childhood lead to a somewhat false self-concept, one based on distortions and denials. The self-concept that emerges includes vague perceptions that are not in harmony with our organismic experiences, and this incongruence between self and experience leads to discrepant and seemingly inconsistent behaviors. Sometimes we behave in ways that maintain or enhance our actualizing tendency, and at other times, we may behave in a manner designed to maintain or enhance a self-concept founded on other people’s expectations and evaluations of us.

Vulnerability The greater the incongruence between our perceived self (selfconcept) and our organismic experience, the more vulnerable we are. Rogers (1959) believed that people are vulnerable when they are unaware of the discrepancy between their organismic self and their significant experience.

Anxiety and Threat Whereas vulnerability exists when we have no awareness of the incongruence within our self, anxiety and threat are experienced as we gain awareness of such an incongruence. When we become dimly aware that the discrepancy between our organismic experience and our self-concept may become conscious, we feel anxious. Rogers (1959) defined anxiety as “a state of uneasiness or tension whose cause is unknown” (p. 204). As we become more aware of the incongruence between our organismic experience and our perception of self, our anxiety begins to evolve into threat: that is, an awareness that our self is no longer whole or congruent. Anxiety and threat can represent steps toward psychological health because they signal to us that our organismic experience is inconsistent with our selfconcept. Nevertheless, they are not pleasant or comfortable feelings.

Defensiveness
In order to prevent this inconsistency between our organismic experience and our perceived self, we react in a defensive manner. Defensiveness is the protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by the denial or distortion of experiences inconsistent with it (Rogers, 1959). Because the self-concept consists of many self-descriptive statements, it is a many-faceted phenomenon.

The two chief defenses are distortion and denial. With distortion, we misinterpret an experience in order to fit it into some aspect of our self-concept. We perceive the experience in awareness, but we fail to understand its true meaning. With denial, we refuse to perceive an experience in awareness, or at least we keep some aspect of it from reaching symbolization.

Disorganization
Most people engage in defensive behavior, but sometimes defenses fail and behavior becomes disorganized or psychotic. But why would defenses fail to function?

Denial and distortion are adequate to keep normal people from recognizing this discrepancy, but when the incongruence between people’s perceived self and their organismic experience is either too obvious or occurs too suddenly to be denied or distorted, their behavior becomes disorganized. Disorganization can occur suddenly, or it can take place gradually over a long period of time. Ironically, people are particularly vulnerable to disorganization during therapy, especially if a therapist accurately interprets their actions and also insists that they face the experience prematurely (Rogers, 1959).

In a state of disorganization, people sometimes behave consistently with their organismic experience and sometimes in accordance with their shattered self-concept.

An example of the first case is a previously prudish and proper woman who suddenly begins to use language explicitly sexual and scatological. The second case can be illustrated by a man who, because his self-concept is no longer a gestalt or unified whole, begins to behave in a confused, inconsistent, and totally unpredictable manner. In both cases, behavior is still consistent with the self-concept, but the self-concept has been broken and thus the behavior appears bizarre and confusing.

Psychotherapy
Client-centered therapy is deceptively simple in statement but decidedly difficult in practice. Briefly, the client-centered approach holds that in order for vulnerable or anxious people to grow psychologically, they must come into contact with a therapist who is congruent and whom they perceive as providing an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance and accurate empathy. But therein lies the difficulty. The qualities of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding are not easy for a counselor to attain.

Like person-centered theory, the client-centered counseling approach can be stated in an if-then fashion. If the conditions of therapist congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic listening are present in a client-counselor relationship, then the process of therapy will transpire. If the process of therapy takes place, then certain outcomes can be predicted. Rogerian therapy, therefore, can be viewed in terms of conditions, process, and outcomes.

Conditions
First, an anxious or vulnerable client must come into contact with a congruent therapist who also possesses empathy and unconditional positive regard for that client. Next, the client must perceive these characteristics in the therapist. Finally, the contact between client and therapist must be of some duration.

Client-centered therapy is unique in its insistence that the conditions of counselor congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic listening are both necessary and sufficient (Rogers, 1957).

Even though all three conditions are necessary for psychological growth, Rogers (1980) believed that congruence is more basic than either unconditional positive regard or empathic listening. Congruence is a general quality possessed by the therapist, whereas the other two conditions are specific feelings or attitudes that the therapist has for an individual client.

Counselor Congruence
Congruence exists when a person’s organismic experiences are matched by an awareness of them and by an ability and willingness to openly express these feelings (Rogers, 1980). To be congruent means to be real or genuine, to be whole or integrated, to be what one truly is.

Because congruence involves (1) feelings, (2) awareness, and (3) expression, incongruence can arise from either of the two points dividing these three experiences. First, there can be a breakdown between feelings and awareness. A person may be feeling angry, and the anger may be obvious to others; but the angry person is unaware of the feeling. The second source of incongruence is a discrepancy between awareness of an experience and the ability or willingness to express it to another. Rogers (1961) stated that therapists will be more effective if they communicate genuine feelings, even when those feelings are negative or threatening.

To do otherwise would be dishonest, and clients will detect—though not necessarily consciously—any significant indicators of incongruence.

Unconditional Positive Regard
Positive regard is the need to be liked, prized, or accepted by another person. When this need exists without any conditions or qualifications, unconditional positive regard occurs (Rogers, 1980). Therapists have unconditional positive regard when they are “experiencing a warm, positive and accepting attitude toward what is the client” (Rogers, 1961, p. 62). The attitude is without possessiveness, without evaluations, and without reservations.

Empathic Listening
The third necessary and sufficient condition of psychological growth is empathic listening. Empathy exists when therapists accurately sense the feelings of their clients and are able to communicate these perceptions so that clients know that anotherperson has entered their world of feelings without prejudice, projection, orevaluation. To Rogers (1980), empathy “means temporarily living in the other’s life,moving about in it delicately without making judgments” (p. 142). Empathy does notinvolve interpreting clients’ meanings or uncovering their unconscious feelings, proceduresthat would entail an external frame of reference and a threat to clients. Incontrast, empathy suggests that a therapist sees things from the client’s point of viewand that the client feels safe and unthreatened.

Stages of Therapeutic Change
The process of constructive personality change can be placed on a continuum from most defensive to most integrated. Rogers (1961) arbitrarily divided this continuum into seven stages.

Stage 1 is characterized by an unwillingness to communicate anything about oneself. People at this stage ordinarily do not seek help, but if for some reason they come to therapy, they are extremely rigid and resistant to change. They do not recognize any problems and refuse to own any personal feelings or emotions.

In Stage 2, clients become slightly less rigid. They discuss external events and other people, but they still disown or fail to recognize their own feelings. However, they may talk about personal feelings as if such feelings were objective phenomena.

As clients enter into Stage 3, they more freely talk about self, although still as an object. “I’m doing the best I can at work, but my boss still doesn’t like me.” Clients talk about feelings and emotions in the past or future tense and avoid present feelings. They refuse to accept their emotions, keep personal feelings at a distance from the here-and-now situation, only vaguely perceive that they can make personal choices, and deny individual responsibility for most of their decisions.

Clients in Stage 4 begin to talk of deep feelings but not ones presently felt. “I was really burned up when my teacher accused me of cheating.” When clients do express present feelings, they are usually surprised by this expression. They deny or distort experiences, although they may have some dim recognition that they are capable of feeling emotions in the present. They begin to question some values that have been introjected from others, and they start to see the incongruence between their perceived self and their organismic experience. They accept more freedom and responsibility than they did in Stage 3 and begin to tentatively allow themselves to become involved in a relationship with the therapist.

By the time clients reach Stage 5, they have begun to undergo significant change and growth. They can express feelings in the present, although they have not yet accurately symbolized those feelings. They are beginning to rely on an internal locus of evaluation for their feelings and to make fresh and new discoveries about themselves. They also experience a greater differentiation of feelings and develop more appreciation for nuances among them. In addition, they begin to make their own decisions and to accept responsibility for their choices.

People at Stage 6 experience dramatic growth and an irreversible movement toward becoming fully functioning or self-actualizing. They freely allow into awareness those experiences that they had previously denied or distorted. They become more congruent and are able to match their present experiences with awareness and with open expression. They no longer evaluate their own behavior from an external viewpoint but rely on their organismic self as the criterion for evaluating experiences. They begin to develop unconditional self-regard, which means that they have a feeling of genuine caring and affection for the person they are becoming. An interesting concomitant to this stage is a physiological loosening. These people experience their whole organismic self, as their muscles relax, tears flow, circulation improves, and physical symptoms disappear. In many ways, Stage 6 signals an end to therapy. Indeed, if therapy were to be terminated at this point, clients would still progress to the next level.

Stage 7 can occur outside the therapeutic encounter, because growth at Stage 6 seems to be irreversible. Clients who reach Stage 7 become fully functioning “persons of tomorrow” (a concept more fully explained in the section titled The Person of Tomorrow). They are able to generalize their in-therapy experiences to their world beyond therapy. They possess the confidence to be themselves at all times, to own and to feel deeply the totality of their experiences, and to live those experiences in the present. Their organismic self, now unified with the self-concept, becomes the locus for evaluating their experiences. People at Stage 7 receive pleasure in knowing that these evaluations are fluid and that change and growth will continue. In addition, they become congruent, possess unconditional positive self-regard, and are able to be loving and empathic toward others.

If the three necessary and sufficient therapeutic conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy are optimal, then what kind of person would emerge? Rogers (1961, 1962, 1980) listed several possible characteristics.

First, psychologically healthy people would be more adaptable. Thus, from an evolutionary viewpoint, they would be more likely to survive—hence the title “persons of tomorrow.”

Second, persons of tomorrow would be open to their experiences, accurately symbolizing them in awareness rather than denying or distorting them. This simple statement is pregnant with meaning. A related characteristic of persons of tomorrow would be a trust in their organismic selves. These fully functioning people would not depend on others for guidance because they would realize that their own experiences are the best criteria for making choices;

A third characteristic of persons of tomorrow would be a tendency to live fully in the moment. Because these people would be open to their experiences, they would experience a constant state of fluidity and change. Rogers (1961) referred to this tendency to live in the momentas existential living. Persons of tomorrow would have no need to deceive themselvesand no reason to impress others.

Fourth, persons of tomorrow would remain confident of their own ability to experience harmonious relations with others. They would feel no need to be liked or loved by everyone, because they would know that they are unconditionally prized and accepted by someone. They would seek intimacy with another person who is probably equally healthy, and such a relationship itself would contribute to the continual growth of each partner.

Fifth, persons of tomorrow would be more integrated, more whole, with no artificial boundary between conscious processes and unconscious ones. Because they would be able to accurately symbolize all their experiences in awareness, they would see clearly the difference between what is and what should be;

Sixth, persons of tomorrow would have a basic trust of human nature. They would not harm others merely for personal gain; they would care about others and be ready to help when needed

Finally, because persons of tomorrow are open to all their experiences, they would enjoy a greater richness in life than do other people. They would neither distort internal stimuli nor buffer their emotions.

·         Rogers, however, contended that people have some degree of free choice and some capacity to be self-directed.

·         Throughout his long career, Rogers remained cognizant of the human capacity for great evil, yet his concept of humanity is realistically optimistic. He believed that people are essentially forward moving and that, under proper conditions, they will grow toward self-actualization.

·         To the extent that we have awareness, we are able to make free choices and to play an active role in forming our personalities.

·         Rogers’s theory is also high on teleology, maintaining that people strive with purpose toward goals that they freely set for themselves.

·         Rogers placed more emphasis on individual differences and uniqueness than on similarities.

·         Although Rogers did not deny the importance of unconscious processes, his primary emphasis was on the ability of people to consciously choose their own course of action.

·         On the dimension of biological versus social influences, Rogers favored the latter.

·         Receives only an average rating on its ability to spark research activity within the general field of personality.

·         Rogerian theory high on falsification. Rogers was one of only a few theorists who spelled out his theory in an if-then framework, and such a paradigm lends itself to either confirmation or disconfirmation.

·         Rogerian theory nevertheless can be extended to a relatively wide range of human personality. person-centered theory high on its ability to explain what is currently known about human behavior.

·         We rate person-centered theory very high for its consistency and its carefully worked-out operational definitions.

·         The theory itself is unusually clear and economical, but some of the language is awkward and vague.

What is unconditional positive regard quizlet?

Which of the following is an example of unconditional positive regard *?

Who emphasized the importance of unconditional positive regard?

Which of the following statements applies to unconditional positive regard with respect to Rogers theory?