Peak experiences

Type of Psychology: Cognitive/emotional; Cross-cultural; Developmental; Religion; Psychology

Abraham Maslow called the mystical experiences of awe and absorption regularly described by self-actualized people “peak experiences.” Subsequent research has found that the quality of peak experiences may vary by age and culture. Recently, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described the related concept of the experience of “flow,” that can occur when one is fully engaged in an activity.

Introduction

In the 1970s, Abraham Maslow developed a humanistic theory of personality and motivation to describe people's positive potential, in contrast to many other psychological theories that focused on people's struggles and failings. Peak experience is a term coined by Maslow to describe a characteristic experience of people who were, in his view, self-actualized—fulfilling their human potential. These people reported experiences of wonder, awe and ecstasy, in which their sense of individuality became absorbed in the world. The descriptions were of a decidedly spiritual, although not necessarily religious, nature. Maslow investigated these experiences through studying the lives of people who he felt were self-actualized, and through interviewing everyday people on their emotionally positive experiences.

In more recent times, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has researched a similar concept which he terms “flow.” Like peak experiences, flow is a state of absorption that arises when one is engaged in activities that challenge one to use the full extent of his or her skills. The result can be a state of positive emotion in which the person “becomes one” with the activity. While peak experiences and flow are not equivalent concepts, they have considerable overlap and are regularly investigated in conjunction with each other.

The Nature and Effect of Peak Experiences

To understand the nature of peak experiences, Maslow asked people to describe the most emotionally powerful experience in their lives. He found that people often described such experiences in mystical or spiritual terms. People described feeling intense happiness and integrated with the world. In Religion, Values and Peak Experience, Maslow describes peak experiences as “Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences.”

Not all peak experiences are as intense as described above, but often people feel changed by them. In the interviews Maslow conducted people reported trying to repeat such experiences, and feeling more compassionate to others and more accepting and comfortable in the world than they had felt prior to the experience.

Peak Experiences in the Context of Maslow's Theory of Motivation

Maslow's humanistic theory of personality and motivation sought to describe the positive potential of people. Maslow described people as having B-needs and D-needs. These are hierarchically arranged, often pictured as a pyramid, with the D-needs, D is an abbreviation for deficiency, forming the large pyramidal base. D-needs include physiological needs such as food and sleep, safety needs such as security, love and belonging needs such as friendship, and esteem needs such as confidence and the respect of others. Once these needs are fulfilled to a reasonable level, one can develop B-needs. B is an abbreviation for being. These are the needs associated with self-actualization and living to one's full potential. B-needs include justice, morality, and clear, realistic perception.

Maslow came to his description of self-actualization by examining the lives of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as friends and acquaintances that he felt were examples of self-actualized or fully functioning people. He looked for commonalities among these people to describe the nature of self actualization. Maslow concluded that self-actualized people have a number of characteristics in common, including self-acceptance, realism, autonomy, spontaneity, democratic attitudes, and a need for solitude and privacy.

Maslow found that the people he described as self-actualized described peak experiences much more frequently than people who were not self-actualized, although he noted that almost all people experienced at least some peak experiences in their lifetimes. In interviews he did find some people, who he called “non-peakers,” who claimed to never have had a peak experience. These people, he said, were overly cognitive, non-emotional, and overly controlled.

Maslow was not the only humanistic psychologist to describe the nature of self-actualization. Carl Rogers also used this term to describe what he saw as the innate tendency of the person to fulfill all his or her potentials. Rogers's focus was on how, in therapeutic relationships, this innate tendency could be fostered in the service of healing, while Maslow did not describe a therapeutic process. Maslow and Rogers described the self-actualized person in similar terms, but Rogers did not include peak experiences in his description. Perhaps most importantly, Rogers argued that all individuals strive for self-actualization, although under harsh circumstances this tendency for actualization can be thwarted. Maslow, in contrast, believed very few people, perhaps as little as two per cent of the population, attained self-actualization.

Maslow's investigations led him to conclude that peak experiences may vary with age. The college-age students he interviewed were more likely to describe emotionally intense experiences than were older individuals. Older individuals were more likely to describe their most positive experiences in terms of serenity rather than intense ecstasy. Maslow termed these “plateau experiences,” in contrast with peak experiences. He found that these sorts of serene experiences were more consistent than were intense peak experiences, which could be relatively rare. In the later part of Maslow's life, he began to investigate how the practice of meditation might help one achieve and sustain plateau experiences.

The situations that evoke peak experiences vary from person to person, and perhaps from culture to culture. In general, however, being in nature, hearing or performing music, or being with loved ones are commonly cited as situations in which peak experiences are more likely to be experienced. These situations seem to encourage the emotional openness that may be a prerequisite for a peak experience. For some people, ingesting hallucinogenic drugs may also induce peak experiences.

Peak experiences may also vary by culture. Maslow himself did not study cultural differences, but psychologist Gayle Privette has researched them. Privette found that cultures might vary in the way they describe their most significant experiences. Chinese people, for example describe themselves experiencing more serenity than vivid joy in terms of their peak experiences. Portuguese students reported peak experiences related to developmental milestones more than did Chinese students. Much cross-cultural investigation remains to be done.

Research on peak experiences

By their nature, peak experiences are not likely to be subject to controlled experimentation in laboratory settings. Rather, interviews, questionnaires, and narrative analyses have formed the body of research on this topic. Maslow examined historical or archival records of people he felt were self-actualized, and conducted interviews with those he had access to. He also interviewed college students on their peak experiences. His mode of investigation has been criticized for being too open-ended and unsystematic. Such methods can provide a rich description, but may lack generality.

Other researchers have developed scales to measure peak experiences in order to conduct more systematic research with larger numbers of participants. Gayle Privette developed the Experience Questionnaire to study the nature of peak experiences, and examined the experiences of a variety of individuals with this questionnaire. From this research, three characteristics were found to signify peak experiences: One of these three characteristics was labeled Fulfillment. This referred to the intrinsically rewarding nature of peak experiences. A second characteristic Privette called Significance, referring to the fact that participants considered the peak experiences to be important. The final characteristic was labeled Spirituality and referred to the absorption of the self into the experience.

Eugene Mathes and collaborators also examined peak experiences as measured by questionnaires called the Peak Scale and the Absorption Scale. College students who completed these scales were found to describe Peak Experiences as primarily mystical events, not simply moments of happiness.

The concept of “flow,” described and researched by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has several characteristics in common with peak experiences, and sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. However, although they share some qualities, flow and peak experiences do not seem to be identical experiences. Flow refers to the state of pleasurable absorption that can occur when one is engaged in an activity that challenges but does not exceed one's level of skill. Flow experiences generally occur when a task has clear goals and feedback. Like Peak Experiences in general, one's sense of self may not be distinct in flow experiences, they are emotionally positive, and one may lose a sense of time during both. Csikszentmihalyi has described meditative states as experiences of flow, but most theorizing and research on flow concerns activities such as sports and creative endeavors. Sometimes the term “Peak Performance” is used to describe the quality of the outcomes that may occur as a result of activities performed in flow.

Psychologist Gayle Privette has clarified the theoretical distinctions described above, and found support for them in the descriptions of experiences of college students. As mentioned above, peak experiences were distinguished by their fulfillment, significance and spirituality. Peak Performance was characterized by the intensity of the focus of the transaction of the self with the environment. Flow was characterized by a sense of play.

Bibliography

Compton, W. C., & Hoffman, E. Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Flourishing. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.

Maslow, A. (1968). Toward A Psychology of Being (2d ed.). New York: Van Nostrand.

Maslow, A. (1970). Religions, Values, and Peak-experiences,. New York: Viking Press.

Privette, G. (2001). "Defining Moments of Self-actualization". In The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Leading Edges In Theory, Research, and Practice. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Wilson, C. (2009). Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience. London: Watkins.