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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