Page 44 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 18
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As a next step, I would like to develop a ques�-
Yet, in modern psychology the heart is nowhere onnaire that can collect quan�ta�ve data about
to be found. There is an enormous interest in people’s understanding and experience of the
the mind, intelligence and cogni�on, and of heart, using ques�ons with a Likert scale that
course, these are important too. But in our eve- contrast the mind and the heart. For example,
ryday life – at least in English – people are refer- asking subjects where various psychological
ring to the heart all the �me using very com- ac�vi�es occur, in the mind or the heart?, for
mon English idioms, such as “That touched my example, memory, emo�ons, visuo-spa�al rea-
heart,“ “I’m heartbroken,” “He’s faint-hearted,” soning, percep�on, values, human rela�ons-
and “We had a heart-to-heart conversa�on.” hips, the virtues, and spiritual experience.
It seems as if the scien�fic psychology that I am also interested in the obviously close rela-
emerged in the late 1800’s in the West has had �onship between the physical heart and the
a bias towards the mind and cogni�on throug- psychological heart. It appears that very early in
hout its history and has basically ignored the life, children come to recognize that they have
role of the heart in human psychology, in spite feelings in their chest and stomach, and as they
of its very common use in everyday life. I fear enter into their family’s language-system, they
that modern psychology so priori�zes the me- start to use the word “heart” to refer to emo�-
thods and assump�ons of the natural sciences ons that they have mostly in their chest. As
that much of it has become biased against uni- people gradually develop into moral beings,
quely human phenomena like the heart, and their emo�ons come to be associated with im-
this has led to some distor�ons in its psycho- portant values in life, like good and bad, and
logy. All this underscores for me the value to eventually, our emo�ons become a�uned to
Chris�an psychology of studying the everyday the sacred and the profane. Cogni�ve develop-
experience of regular laypeople, in order to de- ment is obviously important in human matura-
velop a psychology that can give us what the �on, especially in modern culture, but maybe
philosopher Charles Taylor called the “Best the cul�va�on of the values of the heart is also
Available Account,” that is, the best descrip�on a very worthwhile aspect of human develop-
of human life as it’s actually lived. ment.
So, I got mo�vated to do some research on the So, these are some of my early thoughts on this
heart. So far, I have done interviews with twen- project.
ty-four Chris�an scholars in fields like theology,
literature, philosophy, and psychotherapy, In the future I would also like to find out more
using open-ended ques�ons, like “What is the about reference to “heart” in other languages.
psychological heart?“ “Where in your body is One of my Chinese friends recorded and trans-
the psychological heart located?” “What are lated some interviews with Mandarin-speakers,
the func�ons of the psychological heart?” using the same ques�onnaire, only translated
into Mandarin, and I would love to work with
I have also gathered data from Twi�er. I hired others who are interested in doing some inter-
someone to write a formula to collect every views with na�ve speakers of their language or
tweet using the word “heart,” and we obtained who would be willing to collect some “heart-
100,000 tweets in five hours. I found that 85% idioms” from their language. If you would like
of the uses of “heart” referred to the psycholo- to collaborate on such a project, please contact
gical heart, most of them using various English me at eljohnson@hbu.edu.
idioms, and only about 7% referred to the phy-
sical heart. I am currently con�nuing to do ana-
lysis on this dataset.
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