What Is The Interplay Between The Third Wave And Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs

Many examples of the interplay between the psychological concepts of emotion, motivation and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are evident in the documentary The Third Wave. The tsunami that hit Peraliya, Sri Lanka in December of 2004 devastated the community, killing over 2000 people and washed away all of the homes and nearly all of the infrastructure. Volunteers from around the world, and all walks of life, felt a calling to travel to Sri Lanka in any way they could, so that they could help the survivors (Thompson, 2008). As the volunteers began to arrive on December 28, they were taken aback at the desperation of the survivors, fighting over even the smallest items they could offer, intensely driven by the basic human need for food, shelter
Eventually, thousands of refugees per day began to arrive seeking food, water, and medicine, and nobody was turned away. While emotional states tend to stay consistent among all humans, how emotions are expressed can vary based on cultural display rules (Huamng, Matsumoto, 2017). However, in the film, a westernized audience can see and relate to the emotions of the Sri Lankan villagers. Their faces show their pain, anger, love, and an empathetic audience member may feel those emotions as well. By the fourth week of recovery, an audience member may have empathetically felt the fear and joy of the children as the volunteers coaxed them to the edge of the ocean and encouraged them to overcome their fears and play in the surf. It is in that part of the film that the viewer begins to see the building of levels 3 and 4 of the pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy: Love and Self Esteem. It is in this part of the film that there is a clear social connection between the volunteers and the villagers, and the villagers to each other. There is a palpable feeling of love, sadness, and compassion - interpersonal emotions (Huang, Matsumoto, 2017) - on
Samuel Taylor (2017) stated in his lecture on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs that any level below Self-Actualization and Self-Transcendence is not permanent and one can fall one or more levels due to any variety of circumstances and the film demonstrates that phenomenon through a key event. In the 6th week of recovery, the February monsoons flood the village and the community is at once thrown back down to the first level of the hierarchy. Once again, the community pulled together to overcome the flood. They recovered quickly and regained their basic needs and the love and esteem of levels three and four. Two months after the disaster, a villager donated new school uniforms to the children so they could go back to school, have some sense of normalcy in their lives and begin to work on their personal self-actualization, the 5th level of Maslow’s hierarchy. Also, at that time, the villagers, having had their basic needs met, began to display feelings of jealousy and anger that they were not getting the money, supplies, and respect that they felt were due, or they felt that others who were not as deserving were getting more than their fair share. They became very angry, some to the point of violent behavior, at the volunteers, who they accused of playing favorites. The volunteers began to feel their own negative emotions as they struggled to understand what was going on, with their own flagging energy and health, and emotional strain of being disconnected from their home