ROGERS: PERSON-

CENTERED THEORY
• Carl Rogers was a well-known spokesperson for humanistic
psychology
• One of the first members of the Association of Humanistic Psychology
• Built ideas on Adler’s belief that people have a fundamental
tendency to develop in healthy directions
• Most people are split, aware of part of themselves that is
acceptable to others but unaware of a deeper “real self” that has
the potential for health and vitality.
• Self-esteem suffers when the real self is not affirmed by others
• 5 characteristics that measures if a person is “fully functioning” or
most healthy
 Openness to experience
THE FULLY Existential living

FUNCTIONING Organismic trust

PERSON Experiential freedom

creativity
 If you are a more
RESEARCH “fully functioning”
person do you have
QUESTION less anxiety?

&
As a person exhibits
more characteristics
HYPOTHESIS of a fully functioning
person, they feel less
anxiety in their life.
 RESEARCH
• Defined anxiety: Excessive and intense feeling towards everyday activities

• Developed survey questions associated with Rogers characteristics of a “fully

functioning”, healthy person.

• Added a survey question associated with anxiety

• Opened the survey to the general public (Facebook, social groups, friends,
family, etc.)
 ANALYSIS
• 200+ responses
• Our sample size worked well and was a good size, but targeting a more specific
sample demographic might have given us more telling results.

• Graphed correlations between Anxiety (question 3) and every other question

(measuring a “fully functional” person)

• Based on our correlation analysis, lower anxiety is not necessarily associated with a
highly functional, healthy person.
• Our results were inconclusive, so we were not able to prove our hypothesis true.
 CONCLUSIONS
• More questions/longer survey measuring each aspect of Rogers “fully functioning” person theory.
• More questions measuring anxiety

• Each person’s definition of anxiety could be different. We needed to more define our definition in
the survey questions.
• Since our results were all over the map, there may have been too many variables involved in our
study. Measuring anxiety with in an effort to correlate it with anything is a difficult prospect because
there are so many different causes and influencing factors regarding anxiety.

• If we were to do this experiment again, we might take a single component of the “Fully Functioning
Person” and measure a smaller, more specific demographic in order to control the variables more
effectively. We could conduct a separate survey for each aspect of the “Fully Functioning Person” and
combine the surveys to generate more controlled results.

• We compared each question with anxiety. further recommendation would be to take all questions
regarding a “fully functioning” person, decide if they are considered a “fully functioning” person, then
look at their anxiety.
• For example: define a “fully functional” person with more survey questions, define anxiety with more
survey questions then compare those 2 outcomes versus comparing several outcomes, all to
anxiety.