Abraham Maslow Glossary

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Instructor's addition: This glossary was created as a supplemental course resource and was not part of Dr. C. George Boeree's original text.

Foundations of Maslow's Theory

Humanistic Psychology: An approach to psychology emphasizing the whole person, human potential, personal growth, choice, meaning, and psychological health. Maslow was one of the major founders of the humanistic movement in psychology.
Hierarchy of Needs: Maslow's theory that human needs can be arranged according to their relative priority. Lower needs generally become more pressing when they are unsatisfied, while higher needs become increasingly important as lower needs are reasonably satisfied.
Prepotency: The principle that some needs have greater priority or urgency than others. A more prepotent unsatisfied need tends to demand attention before a less urgent need.
Instinctoid Needs: Maslow's term for needs that are instinct-like. He believed that basic human needs have a biological foundation, although their expression can also be influenced by learning, culture, and individual circumstances.
Homeostasis: The tendency of an organism to maintain internal balance. Maslow used this principle to help explain deficit needs: a deficiency creates motivation, and satisfying the deficiency reduces that motivation.
Deficiency Motivation: Motivation produced by a perceived lack or deficit. The person is motivated to obtain something that is missing, such as food, safety, belonging, or esteem.
Growth Motivation: Motivation directed toward development, fulfillment, and the realization of one's potential rather than toward correcting a deficiency.

Hierarchy of Needs

Physiological Needs: Basic biological requirements necessary for survival and physical functioning, including oxygen, water, food, sleep, activity, temperature regulation, elimination of wastes, and other bodily needs.
Safety and Security Needs: Needs for safety, stability, protection, structure, order, predictability, and freedom from excessive fear and danger.
Love and Belonging Needs: Needs for affection, friendship, intimate relationships, family, acceptance, community, and a sense of belonging with other people.
Esteem Needs: Needs involving respect, worth, competence, and achievement. Maslow distinguished between esteem received from other people and the development of self-respect.
Lower Esteem Needs: Needs involving recognition from other people, including status, reputation, attention, appreciation, prestige, and respect.
Higher Esteem Needs: Needs involving self-respect, including confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom.
Self-Actualization: The continuing process of developing and fulfilling one's potential, becoming more fully oneself, and becoming capable of expressing the abilities and possibilities within the person.

Deficit Needs and Growth Needs

Deficit Needs (D-Needs): Needs motivated by a deficiency. Maslow included physiological, safety, love and belonging, and esteem needs in this category. When the deficiency is adequately satisfied, the need becomes less motivating.
Being Needs (B-Needs): Needs associated with growth, fulfillment, and self-actualization rather than correcting a deficiency. Unlike deficit needs, they may become stronger rather than weaker as they are satisfied.
Regression: A return in motivational priority to lower-level needs when previously satisfied needs are threatened. Severe stress, insecurity, loss, or deprivation can make lower needs important again.
Fixation: A persistent preoccupation with a level of need associated with serious deprivation or insecurity earlier in life. Even when present circumstances improve, the person may continue behaving as though the earlier deficiency remains.
Philosophy of the Future: Maslow's suggestion that asking people to describe their ideal future can reveal which needs they believe are satisfied and which remain important or unfulfilled.

The Self-Actualizing Person

Self-Actualizing Person: A person who has reasonably satisfied the lower needs and is primarily motivated by growth, fulfillment, and the development of personal potential.
Biographical Analysis: The qualitative method Maslow used to study people he considered self-actualizing. He examined biographies, writings, behavior, and people he knew personally to identify characteristics they appeared to share.
Reality-Centered: The ability to perceive reality relatively accurately and distinguish what is genuine from what is false, artificial, or dishonest.
Problem-Centered: A tendency to focus upon solving meaningful problems rather than becoming primarily absorbed in personal complaints or self-concern.
Means and Ends: Self-actualizing people may value the process of doing something as well as its final result. The journey can have value independently of the destination.
Solitude: The capacity to be comfortable alone without requiring constant reassurance, entertainment, or approval from other people.
Deep Personal Relationships: A tendency to develop a smaller number of close and meaningful relationships rather than depending primarily upon many superficial relationships.
Autonomy: Relative independence from external approval, social pressure, and environmental demands. Self-actualizing people rely more strongly upon internal values and judgments.
Resistance to Enculturation: The ability to resist unnecessary pressure to conform to cultural expectations. This does not require rejecting society, but it allows the person to maintain individuality when conformity conflicts with personal values.
Acceptance of Self and Others: The ability to recognize and accept oneself and other people realistically without constantly demanding that harmless differences or imperfections be changed.
Spontaneity and Simplicity: A tendency toward natural, genuine, and relatively unpretentious behavior rather than excessive concern with appearances or artificial social performance.
Democratic Values: Respect for other people regardless of social position or background, together with openness toward individual and cultural differences.
Human Kinship: A sense of identification with and concern for humanity as a whole. Maslow related this quality to social interest, compassion, and concern for other people.
Freshness of Appreciation: The ability to continue experiencing ordinary aspects of life with interest, gratitude, enjoyment, or wonder rather than automatically taking them for granted.
Creativity: A flexible, original, and spontaneous way of approaching life. Maslow viewed creativity broadly and did not restrict it to artistic talent.
Peak Experience: An unusually intense experience of unity, meaning, wonder, transcendence, or connection in which the person may temporarily feel beyond ordinary concerns and experience a profound sense of relationship with life, nature, humanity, or the universe.

Being, Growth, and Higher Values

Being-Cognition (B-Cognition): A way of perceiving experience openly and holistically, appreciating something for what it is rather than primarily judging it according to how it can satisfy a personal deficiency.
Deficiency-Cognition (D-Cognition): A way of perceiving people or experiences primarily in terms of one's own unmet needs and what they can provide to satisfy those needs.
Metaneeds: Higher needs associated with self-actualization and the pursuit of Being-values such as truth, beauty, goodness, justice, wholeness, and meaningfulness.
Being-Values (B-Values): Values associated with self-actualization and psychologically healthy functioning. Maslow described values including truth, goodness, beauty, unity, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency, and meaningfulness.
Metapathology: Psychological distress that can result when higher Being-needs and Being-values are chronically frustrated. Maslow associated such deprivation with experiences such as alienation, cynicism, despair, disgust, and depression.
Jonah Complex: Maslow's term for the fear of one's own highest possibilities. A person may avoid growth, responsibility, achievement, or the full development of personal potential because realizing those possibilities can itself feel intimidating.

Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology

Third Force: A term used for humanistic psychology as an alternative to the two dominant psychological traditions of the period: psychoanalytic psychology and behaviorism.
Human Potential Movement: A broad movement emphasizing personal growth, creativity, fulfillment, psychological health, and the development of human possibilities. Maslow's work strongly influenced this movement.
Fourth Force: Maslow's term for the emerging transpersonal approach to psychology, which extended humanistic psychology toward the study of transcendent experiences and higher states of consciousness.
Transpersonal Psychology: An approach to psychology concerned with experiences that extend beyond the ordinary individual sense of self, including meditation, transcendence, higher states of consciousness, spiritual experience, and related aspects of human experience.

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