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Although there are critiques of the humanistic psychologists (e.g., that Maslow focused on
historically productive rather than destructive personalities in his research and thus drew overly
optimistic conclusions about the capacity of people to do good), the ideas of humanism are so
powerful and optimistic that they have continued to influence both everyday experiences as well
as psychology. Today the positive psychology movement argues for many of these ideas, and
research has documented the extent to which thinking positively and openly has important
positive consequences for our relationships, our life satisfaction, and our psychological and
physical health (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). [13]
Research Focus: Self-Discrepancies, Anxiety, and Depression
Tory Higgins and his colleagues (Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman, 1986; Strauman & Higgins, 1988) [14] have
studied how different aspects of the self-concept relate to personality characteristics. These researchers focused on
the types of emotional distress that we might experience as a result of how we are currently evaluating our self-
concept. Higgins proposes that the emotions we experience are determined both by our perceptions of how well our
own behaviors meet up to the standards and goals we have provided ourselves (our internal standards) and by our
perceptions of how others think about us (our external standards). Furthermore, Higgins argues that different types
of self-discrepancies lead to different types of negative emotions.
In one of Higgins’s experiments (Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman., 1986),[15] participants were first asked to
describe themselves using a self-report measure. The participants listed 10 thoughts that they thought described the
kind of person they actually are; this is the actual self-concept. Then, participants also listed 10 thoughts that they
thought described the type of person they would “ideally like to be” (the ideal self-concept) as well as 10 thoughts
describing the way that someone else—for instance, a parent—thinks they “ought to be” (the ought self-concept).
Higgins then divided his participants into two groups. Those with low self-concept discrepancies were those who
listed similar traits on all three lists. Their ideal, ought, and actual self-concepts were all pretty similar and so they
were not considered to be vulnerable to threats to their self-concept. The other half of the participants, those
with high self-concept discrepancies, were those for whom the traits listed on the ideal and ought lists were very
different from those listed on the actual self list. These participants were expected to be vulnerable to threats to the
self-concept.
Then, at a later research session, Higgins first asked people to express their current emotions, including those related
to sadness and anxiety. After obtaining this baseline measure Higgins activated either ideal or ought discrepancies for