PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

 

Psychological Values: Views of a Perceptual  Psychologist

Ann Marie O’Roark, PhD, ABAP

President ICP 2009-2011

St. Augustine, Florida USA

Private Practice Consultant: Organizational and Leadership Development 

PSYCHOLOGICAL VALUES AROUND THE WORLD is an ideal conference theme for THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF PSYCHOLOGISTS.  Values shared by ICP members crossed national, racial, social, and religious boundaries to cement ICP into a “family” of professionals for 69 years.  Those shared values are psychological values.  What ever our street address, which ever facet of psychology we find most fascinating, however we actualize and navigate our personal life-journey, we share a pivotal value:

THE UNIVERSALITY OF SCIENCE AND THE ETHICAL PRACTICE  OF  APPLYING SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE TO PROMOTE HUMAN WELL BEING, WHICH REQUIRES A WORLD THAT IS BASICALLY AT PEACE, ENGAGING IN AN OPEN, FACE-TO-FACE SHARING OF PERSPECTIVES AND INFORMATION. 

ICP MEMBERS come together in a climate of mutual respect, an atmosphere that former University of Chicago professor Carl Rogers would have called, an  atmosphere of “UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE  REGARD” FOR ONE ANOTHER. 

            Carl Rogers shaped his person centered therapy out of theory developed  by Syngg and Combs,   Arthur Combs was my doctoral chairman.  PERCEPTUAL PSYCHOLOGY is one of several scientific models of Third Force or Humanistic Psychology, which is essentially subsumed under the umbrella of POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY.

            My interest in humanistic-perceptual psychology and first training in Rogerian person-centered counseling was at Princeton Theological Seminary some 15 years prior to my formal doctoral studies.  It was at the University of Florida that I learned about the then-called third force in psychology, and how it offered an alternative psychological approach in contrast to the psychoanalytic and experimental- behavioral schools of thought.

A  few of the better known giants in humanistic psychology are Abraham Maslow, Kurt Lewin, Jack Gibb, Rollo May, Eric Fromm, Victor Frankl, Fritz Perls, and William James.   Many early psychological heroes spent career time in Chicago, where a fermenting of new paradigms in the social sciences is comparable to periods of creative breakthrough thining in Liepzig, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and New York. 

            Past President Consuelo  Barreda-Hanson came from Australia for psychological training here in Chicago.  During  that time she received a unique  name, Unega Atsika.   The  meaning of Unega Atsika is White Fire and was given to  her at  a  blood-bonding ceremony with the Chicago Cherokee Indian Tribe,  Her story   caused me to reflect on the deep roots of my professional and personal bonding with Chicago intellectual pioneers. In addition to the professional bonding with  the  ideas  generated   by  Rogers and Combs,  equally important to work as an organizational consultant and in leadership training were John Dewey (Democracy and Education), Leslie White (The Science of Cutlure), and the Hawthorne Studies conducted at Western Electric  in Chicago while my grandfather O’Roark was a young engineer-manager there. 

The Hawthorne studies were the first evidence based data collections to show that productivity increased if managers paid attention to, were considerate of their workers.  It was the first proof in leadership literature to support the value of human relations & to add dimensions to work psychology that went beyond task oriented time-motion studies of Frederick Taylor.

Today, my nephew, Douglas continues the O’Roark family tradition of participating in the intellectual pioneering ventures of Chicago.  After teaching  math  in the Charter Schools here, he has been hired by the Univeristy  of Chicago to develop a program for training secondary school teachers about  creative teaching of mathematics.  The U. of Chicago is where John Dewey and his wife established the first university base k-12 laboratory schools.   And where today’s world famous positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recently developed his creativity theory often  referred to as the “flow” theory.

            While I call upon a full range of psychological theories and intervention techniques that range from desensitization to assertiveness training, when they are relevant for specific situations, I begin a consultation by observing and diagnosing through the perceptual psychology frame of reference. As Kurt Lewin said so succinctly, there is  nothing so practical as a good theory.  Experience convinces me that humans can only change behaviors or perceptions.   They can-acquire new skils or adjusting actions-reactions. But, even with a gun pointed at one’s head and compelling that person to do something different than they have done before, that action will not be repeated unless some perception about the behavior is changed.  John Dewey wrote in a letter about his first wife, Alice, that she “jogged me out of my old doing and my old way of thinking.”  Alice was able to influence change in both John Dewey’s  behavior and perception.  She most certainly was an ideal principle for that first laboratory school at the University of Chicago.

  Basic assumptions underlying humanistic psychology   include:

1.      Nothing is so highly personal as reality.

2.       Central to all perception is the individual’s interpretation of his or her SELF

3.      The self is a continuous process, never completed

4.      The self consists of all the attitudes, beliefs, and opinions which the individual believes to be true of his or her personal existence.  [HOW MANY HERE BELIEVE YOU ARE BAD SINGERS? SPELLERS?    LIES  LIES---WE ALL HAVE VOCAL CORDS THAT CAN BETRAINED TO SING…..SAME FOR GRADUTE LEVEL MINDS AND SPELLING, SO THEY TELL ME]

5.      The maintenance, protection, enhancement of the self is the basic motive for behavior.

6.      There is a constant assimilation of new ideas and expulsion of old ideas throughout life.

7.      As self perceptions change, behavior changes

Combs and his colleagues used perceptual dimension scales to gather evidence about the effects of perceptual “attitudes, beliefs, and  opinions” on the effectiveness of individual behavior  . Rogers and his group stated 19 variables. Combs’ early students set up as many as 34.    In my initial research study, I selected five scales that had proven to most frequently associated with effective, productive persons.  These are:

ABLE-UNABLE                          [ one’s perception of others]

ADEQUATE-INADEQUATE        [one’s perception   of self]

INTERNAL-EXTERNAL    [frame of reference: being sensitive   to how others are seeing things]

LARGER-SMALLER                        [big picture, long range  vs immediate and specific]                         

OPEN-CLOSED              [values wide sources of information and differences as positive]

             Results of my comparison of elected legislators and public school counselors rated as most and least effective showed that:

1. Percpetual orientation discriminate as predicted between most and least effective groups (p.05)

2. The order of significance was: OPEN-CLOSED TO EXPERIENCE, p.01;

    LARGER-SMALLER VIEWS, p.01;

     INTERNAL-EXTERNAL, p.025;

    ADEQUATE-INADEQUATE, p.10;

    ABLE-UNABLE, p..10. ….

3.  significant differences between the most effective in the two professions were found in two dimensions:   open-closed, p.025,   and internal-external, p.10..  Counselors were more open and more sensitive to how others were experiencing things

            it was an irony, but instructive,  for me to discover that the journal that finally accepted publication of this research liked a report titled “Are successful counselors less positive about themselves?  COUNSELOR EDUCATION AND SUPERVISION was interested in the finding that more effective counselors perceived themselves as less able  than the least effective counselors. Seems better counselors in this study were more humble and still wanting to improve. An admirable characteristic that fits with the lifelong learning beliefs of educators and positive psychologists.

Jumping to a later stages of my career, when I focused on leadership development and organizational consulting, I published The Quest for Executive Effectiveness (2000)  .  It consolidated  academic knowledge bases with lessons of experiences from 20 years of .teaching executive  effectiveness and development courses for The American Management Association and The Center for Creative Leadership. The heart of that book speaks about VALUESand the vital role they have in the success of an organization. This is a quote from sections of chapter 4:

“Values are priorities with emotional energy.   As we order, organize, and integrate our activities for survival, adequacy, growth, and meaningfulness, we reveal what’s important to us in ways all the world can see and come to trust…. . . A uranium rod deep inside a nuclear power plant is the critical core that generates energy for electrical current production.  Given good health, a critical core that drives our thinking, moving, and laughing is not plutonium, or fossil ores, or hydroponics, but values.  Core values give us a sense of commitment and purpose.  They inspire actions that let others see what we consider important.  And values are the basis for bonds of trust among individuals.

            What about core executive values?  What drives success in an executive?  The case argued here is that each executive answers this question individually by periodically searching the depths of their thinking with an eye on maintaining productive priorities.  It takes a vigilante attention to ideas and attitudes that may be out of date or mean-spirited, and a militant compensation for the motes that sit in one’s own eye.

Great success begins inside, and will reflect the values that are attached to one’s self, to others, and to one’s work.  …Pressure and spontaneous behaviors clear away irrelevant window dressing to expose core value. The critical core of the individual holds the unedited responses to what’s important, what I want to get out of life, and how I want to go about getting what I value.  Angry behavior is a good indication that something of great value is present.  An attempt to examine values and assess individual differences unfettered by emotional charges, begins concretely, with 18 lifetime goals [that Rokeach turned into a values  clarification survey].  a comfortable life, equality, an exciting life, family security, freedom, health, inner harmony, mature love, national security, pleasure, salvation, self respect, a sense  of accomplishment, social recognition, true friendship,  wisdom, a world at peace, a world of beauty.   A ranking of the 18 preferences gives an indication of which values are considered most important to the person responding…How we achieve our prized outcomes is assessed as “the other side of the coin.”  What do we value most?  Is it behavior that is: ambitious, broad-minded, capable, clean, courageous, forgiving, helpful, honest, imaginative, independent, intellectual, logical, loving, loyal, obedient, polite, responsible, or self-controlled… This set of dual-track values can connect visibly with workplace activity and a company’s self-description of adequacy.  During a period of expansion, senior employees of a weekly newspaper used the sets of 18 values to help craft mission statements for their soon-to-be-daily publication.  Comparison of individual rankings showed that their common goal-values were health, family security, freedom and self-respect. The management group’s top how-to values showed strong agreement that they wanted to reach these objectives by being honest, ambitious, independent, intellectual, and capable.  The final mission statement was journalistically crisp with two declarations that especially reflect four shared values: ambition, intellectual [activity], family security, capable.

 We will be the leading newspaper [ambition], keenly aware of the changing needs of the community [intellectual activity] with emphasis on publishing information relevant to the lives of the people we serve [family].  We value our fellow employees, both personally and professionally, recognizing them as proficient craftsmen [capable] and responsible team members.

A close link between personal and organizational values is considered to be one key to greater effectiveness that executives may be overlooking.  This conclusion is based on results of a survey of 1,460 managers and chief executives.  Analysis of responses showed that managers who had a value compatibility with their company’s expressed values were the managers who had greater confidence in fulfilling lifetime ambitions, who had less stress spilling over into their home lives, and who held more positive opinions about organizational stakeholders – owners, board of directors, executives, employees, customers.”

            Noach Milgram, editor of the ICP proceedings  book from the 67^th conference is undergoing surgery this week  and could not be with us.  He sent his greetings to the conference participants and this email message about the importance of values

“Vince Lonbardi was  preseumed to say about winning, winning isn’t the only thing, it is everything. So too with values. They are what the game of life is all about.  You are your values.  When you update and sum up your life at any given point  in your lifeline  timeline, how do  you define yourself, what have you achieved, how much has your life mattered --- you begin and you end with your values.”

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The beginning of a value which Noach says what we all begin and end with, has been studied by psychologists, physiologists and neurocognitive specialists  That inception is an inner process, faster than any logical formulation, making an evaluation or  a  judgement call  labeled APPERCEPTION.. The definition from Webster’s New World Dictionary  ( p. 66) says:

             These descriptions  from the 17ty, 18^th,  and 19^th centuries are  early attempts to understand  the way human beings begin the process of determining “what’s important,” and making meaning out of life experiences and situations.  In the 20^th century, Victor Frankl,  a resident of Vienna who preferred the theory of Adler to that of Freud, associated  finding meaning with values. This author of “Man’s Search for Meaning.” said that meaning in  life is found through  experiential values,creative  values, and attitudinal values.

1.The most important example of experiential values is the love we feel towards another. 

2. A second means of discovering meaning is through creative values, by “doing a deed,” as he puts it.  This is the traditional existential idea of providing oneself with meaning by becoming involved in one’s projects, or, better, in the project of one’s own life.  It includes the creativity involved in art, music, writing, invention, and so on.

3. The third means of finding meaning is one few people besides Frankl talk about: attitudinal values.  Attitudinal values include such virtues as compassion, bravery, a good sense of humor, and so on.  But Frankl's most famous example is achieving meaning by way of suffering.

            Understanding of the nature of values is further refined today through neurobiological research.  Personality researchers like Charles Spielberger,connected hard  wired reactions of neurotransmittors to human experiences of basic emotions, such as ANXIETY, CURIOSITY, AND ANGER, which are  essential for survival.  As human autonomic system responses to the environment, they are the physiological mechanics of APPERCEPTIONS and thus play a  key role in the etiology of the development of VALUES.  Spielberger identified and linked chemical activities with what he called the   .  While interests and  behaviors  associated with the expression of each of these emotions can be observed and will reflect an individual’s value set, the  Anger emotion is  the one that is most easily “read” as what makes one most angry  is  something that  threatens  something most loved.  The middle section of the Quest book relates this information to executives’ ability to understand and motivate themselves and others.   This is one of the areas that I hope to find time to write more about in the immediate future  because the evidence shows  strong relationships between  the emotions and major illnesses such as hypertension, heart attack, and certain cancers.

Preparations this trip through perceptual psychology fields with you today led me to develop the ICP Story, a model for professional activism. A  priority value for scientific psychology  and  the application of  its   findings  for the betterment  of people in  every  land  gave focus to the mission of ICP. By coming together face-to-face, being as broadly inclusinve and collaborative as possible, ICP members have developed programs, activities and concepts that promote well being as well as innovations in the international community of associations, ICP professional activism is unique in that it ‘s character remains centered on it’s educational mission that has not become scattered by attempting to become a services pipeline or an emergency response vehicle.

I am honored to have had the opportunity to serve ICP in various leadership capacities across the last 30 years and I am hopeful for the future.  Like the uranium rod deep inside  a power  plant, the critical core of values will  continue to fuel  ICP with creative energies and ideas for advancing  psychology and building collegial friendships that can make a difference in the quality of human living. 

Thank you for being here. And, “Be Well”

REFERENCES

           O’Roark, A.M. (1981)  Are successful counselors less positive about themselves?.  Counselor Education and Supervision, Vol. 21, 1, 63-82, September. (R)

          O’Roark, A.M. (2000)  The Quest for Executive Effectiveness:  Turning Vision Inside Out.  Nevada City, CA:  Blue Dolphin Publications, Inc/ Symposium Press.