Behaviour

Behaviour is essentially the response of an organism to something that the organism experiences. In behavioural psychology these experiences are called stimuli. A characteristic of behaviour is that it can be observed by others. Behaviour includes all form of conscious and unconscious movements, facial expression, the creation of sounds and vegetative reactions such as blushing. In a less dogmatic view, "activities" such as thinking, dreaming, judging are included in the definition.

Behavioural psychologists claim that behaviour can be observed from an objective viewpoint. A more modern worldview questions this assumption believing that the observer in most cases influences the behaviour being observed. A large body of recent research has indicated that the very fact of being part of a research project or of being observed by others in one or the other way modifies behaviour to an extent that the results need to be seriously questioned. We really don’t know if a mouse would react to a stimulus in the same way in nature as it does in the laboratory. A further problem is in the very nature of the stimuli being used since mice are not usually subjected to the stimuli that are used in the laboratory experiments.

Human behaviour is mostly learned, usually complex and stimulated by an enormous number of situations. Some human behaviour is in satisfaction of physiological needs such as thirst and hunger. Some behaviour is in satisfaction of needs with no known physiological needs such as the gregarious behaviour of the typical teenager. Some human behaviour is determined by attitudes or prejudices and some by motivation both conscious and unconscious.

The sensory system provides a reason for a large amount of human behaviour. The smell of food provides the stimulus for a sequence of actions leading to ingestion, particularly if there has been an time interval since the last meal. The sight of an interesting book may provoke the response of reading. Hearing a voice may stimulate an emotional response and the smell of a flower provoke a pleasurable response. Sexual behaviour may involve a sequence of stimuli such as personal affiliation, anticipation general bodily excitement and of course the sexual sensation itself.

Stimuli for behaviour can come from the environment mediated by our sensory organs or from internal emotional mechanisms. Curiosity is such a reason for behavioural responses. The behaviour stimulated by curiosity (and other internal stimuli) shows how different people can react. Some people’s curiosity is mainly directed at self-exploration whilst others naturally prefer to examine the environment.

Desire for achievement is another stimulus for human behaviour. In some people this motivation is strong, in others it is weak. Success seems to breed success and a limited amount of frustration often provokes a greater effort. People generally set their goals a little higher than the level they are sure of achieving and attempt to maintain a balance between level of aspiration and level of performance.

Another powerful determinant of human behaviour is our desire for affiliation. Individuals differ in the degree to which they desire affiliation and these differences affect their reactions to social situations. Behavioural psychologists make some generalisations about people’s need for affiliation. Some of them are presented below along some critical comments:

a) "We tend to affiliate with those we perceive to be similar to us." This view is questionable. A closer look often shows that strong people like to associate with weaker ones or that people with masochistic character traits associate with others to demonstrate some degree of sadism. What we can say is that people share very similar basic unconscious trauma, but they often bring them into the world in complementing ways.

b) "Fear of rejection or isolation affects our desire for affiliation." This statement rings true but does not specify of what nature this affection is. It probably wants to convey that we naturally pull back from sources of rejection. While this is a reasonable assumption, we also need to acknowledge that some people seem to constantly meet people that treat them badly. Freud has called these sort of motives repetition compulsion. From the viewpoint of body mind unity we would look at it as people’s unconscious attempts to recreate old traumatic situations with the hope that they will be able to handle the situation better this time and attain some healing.

c) "People will affiliate to enhance their own position or prestige." Yet they might also be driven by much more basic needs such as the needs to be mirrored and validated by others or the need to find that special person to share the life and get deep nurturing and healing.

Aggression is another powerful behavioural stimulant It has as its goal physical or psychological harm to another. Aggression is often caused by frustration while it is often also misdirected to objects that might provide a trigger but do not constitute the real source of the frustration. In our society aggression is generally unacceptable with the effect that some people turn their resentment inward causing psychological or psychosomatic problems.

Power is a very powerful behavioural stimulant. There are various types of power including:

· coercive power from people with excessive aggression

· exert power influence through knowledge

· legitimate power from invested authority

· referrent power from the ability to promote imitation

· reinforced power from the possession of a system of rewards.

Behavioural psychologists believe that the desire for independence is for most people one of the first stimuli of their adult life. All people are to some degree dependent on others. Dependent people who are generally satisfied with the status quo are not looking for challenges and have a generally lower curiosity drive. Independent people, on the other hand, are motivated to work on something without help, often even refusing help. Independence of course can have a price. People can be so independent that their goals are not met. This is particularly true of people with an emotional investment in their independence. Our self-concept depends more on the evaluation of others than on self-evaluation.

Most adults fortunately find a balance between dependence and independence in most situations. When the achievement and power motives are in conflict we often choose independence and thus avoid the conflict. When highly competent people are too timid to be independent in asserting their abilities we have an example of poor adjustment.

The comments on some of the theories of behavioural psychology show that this psychological approach has difficulties with embracing the complexity of the human nature. Behaviourism, through its association with the linear and logical principles of natural science must be at a loss with all emotional phenomena that seem to work rather in paradoxical ways or in analogies. While natural science is most useful to describe technical, physical and chemical phenomena, it shows clear limits in the field of our psyche that seems much more ruled by paradoxes, such as the more we want to love, the more it escapes us. The holistic approach clearly has a greater ability to deal with this type of phenomenon.

Adjustment

The concept of adjustment too also contradicts the holistic worldview presented so far. It defines health as the behaviour of the majority of people in a society and pathologises people who have difficulties with adhering to this set standard. In this model of thinking it would theoretically be possible that being emotionally sick becomes the "healthy" standard, while more integrated people become the ones that are pathologised. While from a holistic worldview we need to regard the majority of people in modern societies as neurotic, we cannot, however, deduce that schizophrenics are therefore healthy. Healthy people are in touch with their feelings without the necessity to distort them through emotional defences. They do not necessarily try to adjust to the behaviour sanctioned by the majority of our society, at the same time they will easily comply with some of the standards while they have to fight some others that feel too restrictive. Take some time to think about issues in our society where people fight for their rights. In the following we give you some more ideas on attitudes as the term is used in conventional psychology. We will then compare it with the term basic belief, a term that is used in the humanistic approaches to psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis does not use the term attitude at all.

Attitude

According to Chaplin, an attitude is " a relatively stable and enduring predisposition to behave or react in a certain way toward persons, objects, institutions or issues." The attitudes and the opinions that we learn and acquire in our experiences throughout life direct a great deal of our adult behaviour. Most adults think that when faced with any new situation they consider all its aspects cognitively and rationally and in this way develop an attitude to the situation, which in turn determines their behaviour. In fact, many of our attitudes and opinions are not developed rationally but emotionally. The more insight we have about the origin of our attitudes, and the better we can understand how they shape our behaviour, the more control we will have over our actions in any given situation.

Most of our attitudes and opinions develop as a consequence of our family relationships and hence are passed on by each generation. With the guidance of our parents and siblings we form attitudes and opinions of a similar nature often in a highly charged emotional atmosphere. Moral and ethical attitudes are also developed this way. Attitudes, once learned and incorporated, are often so strongly held that it is difficult to change them as adults. At the same time we need to acknowledge that many attitudes, such as the ones on race, politics, religion can alter from one generation to the next and from one social class to another.

Of course, adolescents often adopt attitudes and opinions that are opposite and antagonistic to those of their parents, possibly as a way of showing their independence, but also because new generations grow up in different economical and political circumstances that are reflected in their education.

Some of our attitudes and opinions we learn as adults in reflection to what we experience in our environment. Some of our attitudes are formed by adopting the opinions of others with whom we wish to affiliate. Often whole communities hold the same opinions on controversial issues so strongly that these can lead to tragic consequences in terms of things like ethnic cleansing. Attitudes that are very strongly held easily turn into prejudices.

When looking at attitudes from a more holistic point of view we need to consider that underlying all attitudes are unconscious personal and emotional problems. Neurotics may form particular attitudes in an attempt to allow them to express their own emotional difficulties. An example of this is the attitude of intolerance towards people of a different religion, colour, or race. People who are least tolerant of racial or religious differences are often themselves emotionally unstable and neurotic. This intolerance provides them with an avenue to express their personal insecurity and aggression. Issues such as homosexuality and capital punishment often provoke irrational opinions, which become fixed attitudes when people become emotionally involved.

At this stage it is possible to link this to the concept of basic belief. Basic beliefs are "truths" that we form about ourselves in an attempt to find out who we are. They are filters through which we meet the world, and if made conscious they would form sentences such as "People cannot cope with my feelings - so I have to stay by myself."

An attitude is the unconscious, projected and generalised form of a basic belief. While most attitudes are of a rather benign nature, some of them can turn into prejudices that, under the right group-dynamic conditions, can turn malignant and destructive. The basic belief "People hate me - I must be a nuisance," might then turn into the attitude "We hate the Jews -let us get rid of them." Personal experience is here generalised and the role of the sufferer (I am hated) substituted for the one of the doer (We hate.) As we have seen in the Third Reich, almost a whole generation of people with a low sense of self can turn their general frustration about love and life into racist attitudes towards another ethnic group.

Instincts

Instincts are behavioural patterns that are passed on from one generation by means of genetic code as is the blueprint for the organism’s anatomy and physiology. We can regard them as the basic functions that enable an organism to survive as an individual and to reproduce to maintain the species. As such they include activities such as web building, migratory behaviour, searching for the right kinds of food and mating when the organism has reached the appropriate level of maturity.

To be called instinctive, a behavioural pattern must meet three criteria:

1. The behaviour must be performed adequately on its first appearance.

2. The same pattern of behaviour must be performed in the same way by every member of the species for which the behaviour is appropriate.

3. The behaviour must involve a complex series of interrelationships between stimuli and responses over an interval of time.

Instinctive behaviour is therefore automatic, stereotyped and species-specific.

For most organisms it is only necessary to learn their limited instinctive repertoire to be able to predict exactly how they will respond to any given stimulus. Instinctive behaviour is characterised by its rigidity and lack of modification, the stereotyped nature of the behaviour within a species, and the absence of any purposeful awareness. Human behaviour, on the other hand is a complex integration of instincts, learned behaviour and attitudes. Some of the natural instinctual forces often appear to be absent. A closer look, however, reveals that they live forth in a symbolic form, for example as symptom of illness.

Goals

Goal is the term to describe the result that we want to achieve with our conscious or unconscious actions. Goals change as we change. Failure to reach a primary goal often causes us to seek the secondary goal as a compromise. Most people set realistic goals for themselves. It is a sign of emotional illness when people set themselves unrealistic goals and thus recreate feelings of failure.

Goal directed behaviour often involves a series of small behavioural steps, each of which brings the individual closer to its goal. Each small successful step reinforces the initial steps to sustain the effort required to reach the goal.

Feelings, emotions and symptoms

These seemingly different entities are discussed in one chapter because they are probably best explained in relation to one another. If we look at the human being from the point of view of body mind unity we have to ask whether feelings, emotions and symptoms can be different entities. We could say that emotions are ways of experiencing the body in an increased level of (emotional) charge and put them into the category body-sensations. We call someone an emotional person when he or she is able to express a whole variety of feelings. From this statement we can extract one link between emotions and feelings: feelings are emotions that are expressed. If we assume that feelings are usually expressed in relationship to other people, or in a wider sense to objects, we could say that feelings are emotions that a person brings into a relationship, thereby also becoming conscious of them.

As an example of this:

In analytical body-psychotherapy we often work with a client lying on the futon with eyes closed. In this position the client might explore their inner world. Sometimes we touch the person in order to bring a certain part of their body mind to awareness. During this work it sometimes happens that a client develops strong body-sensations such as sweating or shivering. The client can identify these body-sensations and describe them but is usually not aware of the feeling connected to them. The feeling only reaches the conscious level when the eyes are opened to face the therapist. Becoming aware of the relationship the emotion, in this example, the client can either project it onto the therapist or connect it with other persons or situations.

The above example can also be used to describe the nature of a symptom. If the body-sensations could be separated from the context in which they occur, either as feeling related to a here and now experience or as manifestation of an old trauma, we might be tempted to call them a symptom. In this view a symptom is a manifestation of the person’s inner reality which we are not able to recognise as such.

As an example:

Imagine you looked through a window into a room and saw a person with her hair standing on end, his eyes popping out, sweating and staring at one end of the room. If you could not see anything else in the room you might come to the conclusion that this person is suffering from an illness. On the other hand if you saw a wild animal attacking you would rate the person’s body-sensations as natural phenomenon. The problem is that we cannot see the wild animal because it exists as an internal object to which the person reacts with "symptoms." To call body-sensations an illness or symptoms is the result of our inability to see the bigger picture, to look at a person in a holistic way.

Emotional control

A controversial concept is the concept of emotional control. For therapists and counsellors belonging to the humanistic tradition the term evokes images of the necessity to repress feelings, when they try to help people embracing feelings. Behavioural psychologists seem to use the term with a positive connotation since they believe that "uncontrolled" feelings need to be brought under control. What is this all about?

The role of the emotions have always raised some interrelated issues:

1. Emotional conflict between diverse emotions.

2. The conflict between emotion and reason.

3. Containment of feelings versus expression

Often people experience very different feelings and emotions at the same time. A person left by their partner might feel rage, sadness and relief all at the same time, a fact that is confusing for the person who feels these feelings. They then usually feel bad about some of these feelings because they seem inappropriate. In our case the person might struggle with the feelings of anger and relief while easily identifying with the pain and sadness. They might attempt to control the anger and relief by consciously concentrating on the images that invoke the sadness. It is our task as counsellors to help people feel more comfortable with all their feelings. People then do not have to judge and control their feelings and emotions. In this sense we encourage clients not to control their emotions and feelings but to embrace them in all their aspects.

Most of us struggle with emerging emotions because they appear somewhat unreasonable. At times we can identify the trigger, that is the event that stimulates the emotion, but we might regard a strong response as unreasonable and inappropriate to the triggering event. At other times we might not even be able to identify the trigger for an emerging emotion. We are probably confused and regard the emotion itself and any possible expression as completely unreasonable.

On this issue of reason the therapeutic world is heavily divided into opposing camps. The more conservative therapeutic approaches hold the view that there are reasonable and unreasonable feelings, good ones and not so good ones, appropriate and inappropriate ones. Consequently they regard people as healthy when they manage to respond with feelings that they have defined as reasonable and positive.

On the other end of the spectrum we find approaches or worldviews that strictly refuse to label feelings and emotions. People who have adopted this worldview believe that every feeling and emotion makes sense in the bigger picture of a person’s past and present life, and that it is our task to meet these feelings with curiosity and respect.

From this viewpoint, which underlies this course, we also refuse to push people towards a certain outcome or to help them to adapt to the rules of this society. The aim of all therapeutic undertaking, as we would like to see it, is to help people expand their consciousness which will in turn help them to choose more freely between alternative behaviours.

We do not think that it is on us to make a judgment on what is a reasonable feeling or emotion. Having said this we have to make sure that we are not misunderstood here. A person’s murderous rage is a reasonable feeling in the context of his or her life experience; it is of course not reasonable that he or she kills somebody. At the same time we claim that exactly therapeutic approaches that do not judge feelings have the best potential to help people with such feelings to integrate them. Approaches that apply value judgments on feelings and emotions will hardly provide the safe space for clients to embrace these hard-to-manage feelings. Chances are that in the course of such "therapy" the feelings get buried even deeper until such time they will break through and damage the person and society.

The last issue on emotional control is about expression versus containment of feelings and emotions. There are many different ways of categorising clients. We can put them into categories in terms of character structures, ego-functioning, self-development and many others, depending on the viewpoint that we assume. All these attempts of categorisation are as helpful as they are limiting in our deep understanding of the clients’ souls. Authors such as Hillman question both the value of categorisation and of the clinical psychological language that we use today.

If we stay in categories for a moment, we can conceptualise ego-weak and ogo-strong clients. Ego-strong clients, and here we come back to our theme, are well in control of their feelings and emotions. They need sometimes some emotional provocation and lots of interpretations of their defences to finally get in touch with their emotions.

Ego-weak clients, on the other hand, burst out in emotions "at the drop of the hat." These people have either never developed ego-defenses or their defences have broken down because of strong and acute trauma or other reasons, such as the loss of a loved one. At this point the different approaches make varied assumptions as to what these people need. If we think of a healthy people as emotionally well defended we would help them to (re) establish emotional defences.

Otherwise we probably conclude that these people need to strengthen their egos through finding additional forms of expression for their emotions. As counsellors we focus on the therapeutic interventions that help ego-weak people need to develop stronger ego functions. As ego-functioning is associated with language, we help people to put their feelings into words. We also help them to define clearer ego-boundaries and help them develop the ability to act on their feelings. This is coming from the notion that one factor that makes people being overwhelmed by their feelings is that they are too scared to act. In other words, they are too feeling-oriented. This is in contrast to ego-strong people who have very strong boundaries, have well developed language skills and are often active on the expense of their feelings.

Motivation

As the last topic in this module we want to share some thoughts on the concept motivation. Motivation is another term used by behavioural psychologists to denote the factors within an organism that make them do what they do. We have touched on the topic earlier in this module when we looked at some of the stimuli for behaviour. Here we want to more explicitely deal with this concept from a different viewpoint.

There are many ways we can think about motivation. We can follow Maslow and put nome motifs into a hierarchical order, or we take a more phenomenological view and ask what motivates us human beings to the myriad things that we have done and that we still do.

The first thing is that we realise that all attempts to put motivation into simple concepts seem to be flawed. Maslow’s order of motifs that put physiological drives (survival needs) at the bottom, followed by security and safety, which in turn is followed by love and affection, seems logical but leaves us high and dry in the face of people suiciding.

New-age people who generally see love at the bottom of the hierarchy of motifs are probably shocked every time a person leaves relationships behind for the search for self-actualisation, a motif almost on the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.

We consider that life is far too complex to be put into simple truths. We might like it or not, but the only instrument that from the outset is open and complex enough to depict the complexity of human life is astrology with its endless possibilities of combining symbols (planets, the sun and the moon) the zodiac and the houses to a complex analogue picture. We might be tempted to dismiss to dismiss astrology as unscientific, mystical or esoteric. All this is true. It is unscientific, mystical and it is one of the four pillars of esotericism, yet it has been around for thousands of years before the emergence of science, millions of people use it every day and it will still be around when concepts such as psychodynamics, behaviourism and all the other concepts based on the cause-and -effect mode have been superseded. In this light dismissing astrology simply shows our ignorance and inability to think in historical dimensions.

A concept on motivation that is of some use is to bring it into connection with healing. Dethlefsen writes: "The path of a human life should lead to completeness; every advancement in learning, however small, makes the human being more complete. We move towards completeness when we add that which is still missing, when we integrate the as yet unknown. Thus, in accordance with the laws, a human being is always confronted by fate with those principles which he has hitherto not realised, those which have remained alien to him, those which are still missing from his experience."

In this context motivation must be the driving force that moves us to the next piece of learning on our way towards emotional and spiritual completeness. The term fate is important here, a concept that so far we have not even touched upon because it lies so far outside of conventional psychological thinking.

REVIEW QUESTION

Under what circumstances does an attitude become a prejudice?