Psyche and the Literary Muses: The contribution of literary content to scientific psychology (Linguistic Approaches to Literature)

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Author: Martin S. Lindauer

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Psyche and the Literary Muses

Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL) Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL) provides an international forum for researchers who believe that the application of linguistic methods leads to a deeper and more far-reaching understanding of many aspects of literature. The emphasis will be on pragmatic approaches intersecting with areas such as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, rhetoric, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and stylistics.

Editors Willie van Peer

Sonia Zyngier

University of Munich

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Advisory Editorial Board Douglas Biber

Arthur C. Graesser

University of Memphis

Keith Oatley University of Toronto

Marisa Bortolussi

Frank Hakemulder

Yeshayahu Shen

Donald C. Freeman

Geoff M. Hall

Mick Short

David L. Hoover

Michael Toolan

Don Kuiken

Reuven Tsur

Geoffrey N. Leech

Peter Verdonk

Northern Arizona University University of Alberta University of Southern California

Harald Fricke

University of Fribourg

Richard Gerrig

Stony Brook University

Raymond W. Jr. Gibbs

University of California, Santa Cruz

Rachel Giora

Tel Aviv University

Utrecht University

University of Wales, Swansea New York University University of Alberta Lancaster University

Tel Aviv University Lancaster University University of Birmingham Tel Aviv University University of Amsterdam

Paisley Livingston

University of Copenhagen

Max Louwerse

University of Memphis

Volume 7 Psyche and the Literary Muses. The contribution of literary content to scientific psychology by Martin S. Lindauer

Psyche and the Literary Muses The contribution of literary content to scientific psychology

Martin S. Lindauer The College at Brockport, State University of New York

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lindauer, Martin S. Psyche and the literary muses : the contribution of literary content to scientific psychology / Martin S. Lindauer. p. cm. (Linguistic Approaches to Literature, issn 1569-3112 ; v. 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literature--Psychology. I. Title. PN49.L488 2009 801’.92--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 3339 4 (hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8945 2 (eb)

2009008213

© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Dedicated to Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) Daniel E. Berlyne (1924–1976) Colin Martindale (1943–2008)

Table of contents List of tables Preface

ix xi

Part 1. Introduction 1. An orientation 2. Similarities and differences across the psychology of art 3. Competing psychological approaches to the arts: Clinical and scientific 4. The status of the scientific psychology of art

3 7 15 31

Part 2. The psychology of literature: An overview 5. The psychology of literature: Comparisons with other psychologies of art 41 6. A scientific psychology of literary content: Obstacles and steps towards a solution 53 Part 3. The psychological relevance of brief literary forms 7. Poetry, autobiographies, and titles: Their contribution to cognition, creativity, and physiognomic perception 8. Literary names, indices, and clichés: Their contribution to physiognomic perception, emotions, and thinking 9. Quotations: Their psychological usefulness

67 79 91

Part 4. The psychological content of quotations: Person perception and attitudes to aging 10. Person perception and the psychological attributes of the body 11. A study of quotations on the psychological implications of the body 12. Prologue: Aging and the arts 13. Aging’s memorable lines: A study of quotations about growing old 14. The preoccupations of aging: The subject matter of quotations 15. Evaluations of aging in quotations

105 111 119 127 131 143

Part 5. Conclusion

159

16. Implications of a content-oriented psychology of literature

161

viii Psyche and the Literary Muses

Notes References cited Index

171 189 205

List of tables Table 11.1. Quotations about parts of the body and their psychological referents arranged from highest to lowest agreement Table 14.1. The seven groups of quotations Table 14.2. High frequency topics in quotations Table 14.3. Low frequency topics in quotations Table 15.1. Evaluative and non-evaluative quotations Table 15.2. Positive and negative quotations Table 15.3. Evaluations of the top 23 topics

114 131 132 138 143 144 145

Preface Psyche and the Literary Muses builds on the widely held assumption that much of literature, whether it refers to the creativity of authors, the reactions of readers, or the content of literary works is about psychology, that is, thoughts, feelings, personality, and the like. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts acknowledge literature as a gateway to the psyche, as do writers, scholars, literary theorists, and the general public. In this book, my focus is on the literary work rather than, as is often the case, the author or reader. I consider the work central because here is where authors (who create) and readers (who respond) converge; there are no authors or readers of literature without a literary product. The novel, short story, and play come immediately to mind, but I look to the briefest of literary materials: names of fictional characters, titles of short stories, subject-matter indices of the content of literature, extracts from autobiographies, and clichés and quotations taken from literary sources. With these, it is easier to extract material on perception, thinking, emotions, creativity and a wide range of other topics, including person perception and aging. The relevance of literary content to psychological matters is demonstrated through empirical research where objective evidence is relied on and quantification looms large. My perspective, in a word, is scientific. My goals are to strengthen the place of psychology in literature and the arts in general, and to thereby further interdisciplinary exchanges with the humanities. To achieve these goals, Psyche and the Literary Muses is organized as follows. Part I places the book within the frameworks of the psychology of art and psychology in general. To these ends, Chapter 1 summarizes the larger issues of the book; Chapter 2 surveys the relationship between the psychology of art and psychology in general; Chapter 3 reviews clinical and scientific approaches to the arts; Chapter 4 examines the relatively minor place of the psychology of art and the reasons for this. Part II introduces the psychology of literature in broad terms. Chapter 5 relates it to other kinds of art, mainly paintings; Chapter 6 summarizes the problems faced and possible solutions. Part III demonstrates the application, through research, of brief literary forms to psychology. In particular, Chapter 7 investigates the relevance of poetry to learning, autobiographies to creativity, and literary titles to expressive (physiognomic) perception. Chapter 8 investigates the relationship of literary names to physiognomic perception, the emotions covered in literature, and the bearing of literary clichés on cognition. Chapter 9 concentrates on literary

xii Psyche and the Literary Muses

uotations and discusses their relevance to the studies that follow. Part IV presents q several investigations of quotations primarily from literary and related sources. Chapters 10 and 11 study quotations on the perception of persons; and Chapters 12 to 15 examine them in relation to aging. Chapter 16 concludes by extending the book’s findings to several larger issues: a perceptual approach to literature; a liberalized experimental aesthetics of literature; a reinvigorated psychology of the arts; a broadened scientific analysis of the arts; an advancement of interdisciplinary studies; and finally, an evaluation of this book’s approach to literature. I am not the first to write about these subjects.1 Edited books usually contain a chapter or two on literature alongside ones on paintings, music, film, and so on. Books on creativity include writers among other kinds of artists from different areas. The psychology of the reader of literature focuses on the application of cognitive psychology, especially as it relates to readers’ comprehension of literary works. Anthologies that contain extracts from literature illustrate a variety of phenomena, usually of the pathological sort. How-to works are directed to the practical aspects of writing, like overcoming writer’s block and appreciating literature. The pertinence of literature to specific topics, like aging or madness, is also covered in separate books. Increasingly, some take a biological and evolutionary approach to literature. In addition, hundreds of research articles focus on poetry, novels, plays, or short stories. Few publications, though, examine the psychology of literature the way Psyche and the Literary Muses does. It focuses on the content of literature, as already mentioned, but does so for its own sake and not for the elucidation of authors and readers. In addition, this work covers a wide range of brief literary and quasi- literary forms, relies on scientific research, takes a quantitative perspective, and uses research to demonstrate the relevance of different kinds of literary content to various psychological phenomena. More generally, this book ties together science, the arts, and the humanities within an interdisciplinary framework that includes literature, the arts in general, and psychology at large. All these features, rarely combined in one book differ sharply from qualitative, speculative, and psychoanalytic (“Freudian,” “therapeutic,” and clinical) approaches. These and other works are preoccupied with writers and their creativity, or alternatively, readers and their reactions to literature. Psyche and the Literary Muses is addressed to two audiences. The first includes professionals: psychologists, both scientific and clinical; and scholars, literary theorists, and humanists with an interest in literature. The second audience is more general, readers who are curious about the relationship between literature and psychology, and not solely of the clinical sort, who wonder if these disparate disciplines can be usefully related to one another in ways that meaningfully contribute to both.

Preface xiii

Psyche and the Literary Muses complements a recent work of mine, Aging, Creativity, and Art, which also takes a scientific approach, but to paintings and their contribution to an understanding of old age. The book also updates an earlier work of mine, The Psychological Study of Literature, which reviewed early work in this field. Psyche also brings together my studies in different areas of the arts, including aesthetics and creativity, as well as essays on interdisciplinarity, along with investigations of imagery and physiognomic perception.2 These introductory remarks set the stage for Part I, which looks at literature within two broader contexts of psychology.

part 1

Introduction

chapter 1

An orientation Permit me to begin a book on a scientific approach to literature with a myth about the Muses taken from ancient Greek and Roman sources. Traditionally, the Muses numbered nine, of which five were about literature: Erato (love poetry), Calliope (epic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Plyhmia (sacred poetry), and Thalia (comedy). Two additional muses are Euterpe (music) and Terpsichore (dance). (The remaining two muses are Clio [history] and Urnaia [astronomy].) The Muses are associated with Cupid (also known as Eros), a mythical figure who was loved by Psyche, a beautiful princess. Psyche was warned by Cupid, so the story goes, to make no attempt to see him and discover who he is. But Psyche ignored the warning and gazed at Cupid as he slept. As punishment she wandered the earth in search of her lover. Over time, Psyche became synonymous with the soul, the immaterial spirit that controls the physical body, and subsequently was identified with thoughts and feelings, or more broadly, reason and the mind. Psyche eventually lent her name to psychology. The myth of Psyche, as I interpret it, is the attraction between psychology and the arts, literature in particular, their unnatural separation, and eventually their hoped-for unification. These themes are represented in this book. Shifting from myth to reality, it is important to acknowledge the importance of the arts. Cities vie with one another to establish and enhance their symphonies, ballet companies, opera houses, and art museums. Music, dance, paintings, and literature appeal to large audiences, as they have for centuries in different cultures. In addition, art is censured or promoted as propaganda by governments and other agencies. The arts also attract scholars and researchers from numerous professions ranging from art history to literary theory to psychology. The arts evidently have something important to say. What is it? The short answer is that the arts speak to the human condition, much of which is psychological: the creative imagination of artists and the thoughts and feelings of arts audiences, including readers of literature. Among the arts, literature is unique because its content is explicitly psychological: experiences and ideas, memories and thoughts, motives and feelings, conflicts and relationships, beliefs and attitudes, and much more. To a large extent, then, literature is psychology. The other arts, like music, sculpture, and dance, also convey psychological meanings but they are less directly and explicitly psychological. In representational paintings, for example, psychological depictions are limited to a single static scene, portrait, or group. The psychology

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of literature is therefore unique in its treatment of psychological matters because words are used to express and communicate information. Furthermore, writers are like psychologists in being interested in the mind, emotions, and behavior. They carefully observe people and try to make sense of their behavior. Additionally, readers react psychologically, in affect and cognition, to literary content. Literature also plays several important roles in psychology. It illustrates psychological phenomena studied in the lab and clinic, provides ideas and hypotheses to test along with the materials and participants (writers and readers) to do this, corroborates, extends, and amplifies psychological concepts and facts, and challenges the status quo of psychological orthodoxy. A psychological approach to literature, moreover, borrows from and contributes to literary studies, literary criticism, and literary theory. As such, psychology is a bridge to the humanities. Use your imagination again to imagine a study of the world’s greatest works of literature, past and present. These include the writings of Nobel Prize winners, collections of the “best of the year” and the “100 greatest works” chosen by literary authorities, scripts for long-running plays, frequently anthologized poems, biographies, autobiographies, and non-fiction works by leading figures of society who write with a literary flair, and elegantly penned essays on significant social and intellectual issues by the foremost thinkers in the world. Now suppose that this literary treasure trove were scanned into a computer and run through a program that extracted its psychological content. The printout of this large and hypothetical data-set would be an annotated catalog of human hopes and joys, frustrations and delusions, ideals and disappointments, successes and failures, and a host of other psychological themes in all their complexities and complications, contradictions and inconsistencies, profundities and clichés, wisdom and foolishness. In short, literary content is filled with humankind’s mental, personal, social, and behavioral concerns. Now bring some order to this unsorted grab-bag of literary extracts on mental and behavioral phenomena by tabulating the frequencies of the topics covered according to the type of literature from which they came, the dates when they were written, their countries of origin, the gender and age of authors, and other pertinent biographical information. All this information might be correlated with the social-historical-economic circumstances in which these works were written. The outcome of this massive, untidy, and imaginary study of literature could be used to illustrate and buttress arguments, discussions, and studies by literary critics, historians, humanists, scholars, social scientists, and of course psychologists. One set of psychologists, shown this computerized and quantified list, would be dismayed. They are the clinicians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, Freudians, Jungians, and “depth” psychologists. Joining them is a large number of scholars in the humanities who favor psychodynamic views of literature. A second set

Chapter 1. An orientation

of psychologists, standing apart if not aloof from their therapeutic brethren and humanistic colleagues, would be impressed by the print-out of data. They are scientifically oriented psychologists, a cautious lot who dominate academic centers and populate research laboratories, and look favorably on objective and quantitative approaches, rigorous methods, strict controls, careful sampling, and precise statistics. This book belongs in the second group. A scientific psychological approach to literature is regarded warily if not suspiciously by the first group of psychologists, the clinicians, as well as by literary critics, art historians, and humanists, many writers and artists in general, and I would guess a considerable number of readers of literature — assuming they know there is a scientific approach to literature and it is something more than a subject to poke fun at. Clinical and scientific approaches to literature, along with the criticisms of each, are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. Scientific, clinical, scholarly, and commonsensical approaches look at literature in a variety of ways and arrive, not surprisingly, at different interpretations. The scales, though, have been more heavily tipped towards therapeutic, scholarly, and personal orientations while the scientific psychology of literature is a somewhat muffled voice at the periphery. Moreover, a scientific psychology of literature, compared to similar approaches to painting and music, holds a less central place. The reasons for the peripheral place of a scientific psychology of literature are discussed later (Chapter 6). The psychology of literature deserves a better fate. The scientific psychology of literature can be invigorated, I argue in this book, by quantitative studies of its psychological content (although not as extreme as the caricatured model of the computer-churning literary extractor presented earlier). As I maintained then, content is central to the scientific study of literature for it is the point at which authors and readers converge. The goal of Psyche, the book, like that of Psyche, the mythical figure searching for Cupid, is to bring psychology and literature closer together. To accomplish this, I have taken a scientific route that should not only be acceptable to scientific psychologists but also accessible to clinical psychologists, meaningful to literary scholars, and comprehensible by the general public. An empirical psychology of literature, which is to say an approach that is objective, quantitative, and academic (I use the terms interchangeably), strengthens the psychology of art in general, adds useful information to a range of psychological topics, advances experimental aesthetics, promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, and deepens readers’ appreciation of literature. I believe Psyche would approve. Like her never-ending search for Cupid, the quest for an understanding of literature, never ends. The issues raised here are discussed more fully in subsequent chapters, beginning with the next chapter, where the psychology of literature is placed within the larger contexts of the psychology of art and psychology in general.

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chapter 2

Similarities and differences across the psychology of art The poets are in general excellent psychologists, and [on questions concerning] the working of their own minds they are the best1

Each of the arts has attracted psychology, whether it is an interest in artists (the creativity of writers, the early lives of painters, the personality of composers), the audience (the characteristics of readers, the behavior of visitors to art museums, the preferences of concert-goers), and the work (the various styles of literature, the treatment of light in paintings, the emotions aroused by music). The psychology of literature is primarily about authors, readers, and literary works; the psychology of (visual) art refers to painters, viewers, and paintings. A similar three-part division characterizes the psychology of music, dance, architecture, film, and other art forms. Shared among the arts, too, is their dependence on psychological functions, both cognitive (associations, ideas, memories) and personal (feelings, moods, sentiments): a painting is perceived, a novel is reflected upon, a musical selection is enjoyed. “[T]he arts are not marginal for understanding the human mind … They are absolutely essential.” 2 The psychology of art and psychology at large also have much in common. Creativity, for example, applies to both artists and non-artists (scientists) and to works of art as well as non-artistic outcomes (technological breakthroughs). Those who participate in and observe the arts and non-arts rely on identical psychological processes (perception, learning) and traits (motivation, personality). Both specialized and larger domains of psychology call on the same methods of inquiry (case studies, interviews, questionnaires, surveys, tests, ratings) and follow standard research procedures (descriptive, correlational, experimental). In short, psychological investigations of artists, the arts, and arts audiences are similar to the psychological study of any person, object, or group. Consequently, the different psychologies of art bear on the psychology of perception, learning, emotions, development, attitudes, and so on. The reverse is also true.3 The roots of scientific psychology are also closely tied to the psychology of art. Gustav Fechner (1801–1897), a founding father of psychophysics, a conception and procedure that links mental phenomena to their physical counterparts, was also the father of experimental aesthetics, the rigorous study of preferential and evaluative judgments of art. Francis Galton (1822–1911), another forerunner

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of scientific psychology’s interest in individual differences, tested the imagery of painters (found to be primarily visualizers) and writers (verbalizers). Another historical linkage is the school of Introspectionism, the first systematic approach to psychology that arose around the turn of the 20th century. Introspectionists scrupulously probed the conscious contents of the mind among which were two phenomena closely associated with art: imagery and aesthetic distance (the simultaneous reaction to art as both experienced and observed). The Gestaltists, another early school of psychology, championed the view that “the whole is greater than and different from the sum of its parts,” a holistic conception of mental processes intrinsic to the arts, and promoted the importance of experiential phenomena during a period of psychology’s history when the study of mental phenomena, like imagery, was marginalized if not taboo. They were reacting to the restrictions placed on psychology by Behaviorism, a school wary of introspective accounts, self-analysis, and other ways of unraveling consciousness, all of which are key features of the arts. If not for the Gestaltists, the self-reports of artists and observers of the arts would have been rejected or ignored by mainstream academic psychology.

Unique aspects of the psychology of art The psychology of art has several distinguishing features that set it apart from mainstream academic psychology. The arts are extraordinary examples of phenomena that are ordinarily muted in everyday life. The arts can be thought of as prototypes, or exaggerated aspects, of common psychological phenomena. Runof-the-mill experiences are therefore highlighted by artists, arts audiences, and artistic works, who in Simonton’s words are ”significant samples.” 4 Unique to artists, painters, and composers, too, is their ability to transform observations, experiences, and feelings into stories, paintings, music, and other forms that attract and delight audiences. Artists are astute perceivers with lively imaginations and keen intuitions who communicate the “psychological facts of life” in expressive, dramatic, and compelling ways. Artists’ sensitivity to words, forms, colors, sounds, surfaces, and movements, along with their adeptness at manipulating and converting these into works of art, lead to products that hold audiences and give them pleasure. “Artist” and “creative” are synonymous. Arts audiences, too, are unique in psychological terms. Readers, visitors to art museums, and theater- and concert- goers purposefully seek out cognitively complex and affectively evocative events for mental, emotional, and personal reasons. Special to arts audiences as well is their ability to empathize and identify with characters in theater, film, and literature. Arts audiences are also sensitive to the implicit and subtle attributes of

Chapter 2. Similarities and differences across the psychology of art

the scenes, events, people, and feelings depicted in works of art. Like artists and arts audiences, works of art are psychologically extraordinary. Art exists for its own sake, enjoyed for what it is, for non-utilitarian reasons, and not for what can be done with it. Special to works of art, too, is that they are sought out, purchased, and collected. A work of art also defines the artist and audience, for neither exists without it. Many of the special qualities of the arts, noted above, are illustrated by the phenomenon of imagery, a critical characteristic of artists, reactions to art by non-artists, and works of art themselves. Artists imagize, out of which they create artistic images in a medium to which audiences react with their own imagizing and images. The arts therefore prompt images we wouldn’t otherwise have. For the poet Wordsworth, images are the “inward eye” that enchant, enrich, and affect us. A painting, for Mandelbrojt, is “the best way of representing mental [and kinesthetic] images [and sketches are the] closest possible approximation of a mental image.” Imagery also “provides the painter or writer with the essential idea for a picture or a poem” says Richardson. Imagery in the poetry of Coleridge, Keats, and others, most notably Shakespeare, was of considerable interest to early psychologists.5 Interviews of poets, painters, and writers reveal an extensive reliance on imagery. Self-reports on creativity, too, by writers, musicians, and painters from the 18th through the 20th centuries indicate a dependence on images for the initial germ of a work. Quotations attributed to artists also emphasize the role of imagination, verbal associations, memories, and metaphors that are related to images, imagery, and imagizing. Most of the images they report are of the visual sort, that is, the pictures-in-the-head variety.6 Among non-artists, too, self-rated imagery is correlated with an interest and participation in artistic activities: The higher the reported imagery, the greater the involvement in musical events, attendance at theater, and reading of novels. Further, non-artists who are aesthetic, that is, participate in a large number and variety of arts-related activities and events, reported “a reliable and predictable capacity to imagize in aesthetic settings [like concert halls].” Compared to those less involved with the arts, aesthetic people “call upon their imagery or depend on it to be there in response to the arts.” In addition, imagery to nonartistic stimuli (like family photos) increased among non-artists after exposure to classical music and slides of museum-caliber paintings.7 Along with the imagery of artists and non-artists reacting to the arts, imagery in works of art has also been empirically studied. Portrayals of old age in paintings, for example, contain both negative and positive images of aging. In literature, Melville’s Moby Dick, written early in his career, referred to more visual images than Pierre, a late and more introspective work. The latter, in contrast, had more references to tactile images, considered a “near” mode of reception, consistent with the story’s inward-looking

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theme. Otherwise, the two novels contained an equal number of words related to images of sound, smell, and taste.8 Surprisingly, connections between imagery and art have not been actively pursued by cognitive psychologists despite imagery’s prominence, otherwise, in investigations of non-art materials. Few if any studies, for instance, are directed to such fundamental questions as the differences between the imagery of writers, painters, and other artists, their use of visual, tactile, and other types of images, and the vividness, ease of evocation, and the type of imagery (visual, auditory, tactual, olfactory) aroused by various kinds of artistic materials. There are no studies, as far as I can discover, that relate the imagery of artists to the imagery contained in their works and audiences’ imagistic reactions.9 Perhaps the allusiveness of imagery and the subtleties of art, in combination, discourage empirical efforts.

The role of the arts in psychology Linking the arts together, too, are the similar roles they play in psychology, the most prominent of which is illustrative. Persuasive and forceful examples from the arts buttress psychological facts and concepts that have been established with nonartistic materials and non-artists in the laboratory and clinic. Illustrations from the arts individualize grouped data, clarify highly technical analyses, make obtuse abstractions concrete, enliven arcane professional jargon, clarify obscure points, and sharpen turgid prose. The straightforward presentation of bare data and lifeless generalizations are brought alive by a quote from Shakespeare or a portrait by Rembrandt. The arts as illustration therefore increase students’ comprehension of difficult material and enhance their interest. Consequently, they serve as useful adjuncts to the teaching of psychology (or any subject). Extracts from literature, for instance, illustrate psychological development (the traumas of childhood), family relationships (father-son conflicts), pathology (the “mad artist”), and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships (incest), as well as the more rational and everyday aspects of mental life and activity. Ironically, scientific facts are supplemented by literary fictions. Similarly, the cues for depth and distance that apply to paintings, where apparent depth and distance are illusory, also account for veridical (correct) perception. Thus, a landscape on a two-dimensional surface (like a photograph on a page in a book), where objects are flat and at equal distances from one another, relies on monocular cues (perspective, masking, shadow, size) that also hold in actual perception. In each case, veridical or illusory, a two-dimensional retinal projection at the back of the eye represents a three-dimensional physical world. The arts also serve as materials, and artists as participants, in psychological studies.10 Materials from the arts also lie at the core of experimental aesthetics,


where the connections between the physical nature of objects and their psychological consequences are carefully measured. Hypotheses that originate in psychology, in relation to creativity, for example, are tested with artists. Non-artists are observed at artistic venues, such as art museums, and attendees at concerts are surveyed. The arts are also an important part of studies of leisure and recreation. A critical function of the arts is to act as gadflies, directing attention to phenomena ignored in psychology yet deserving to be investigated. The arts also raise doubts about established facts and entrenched theories, cast doubt on accepted findings, challenge notions taken for granted, counter the status quo, and contradict longheld assumptions. Prompted by the arts, psychologists (re)consider understudied and neglected phenomena, and as a result suggest alternative, modified, and new directions for research. The many functions of art, ranging from illustration to hypotheses-testing to corroboration to challenging, are exemplified by the psychological study of old age. Literature describes and paintings depict the perceptions, feelings, attitudes, and behavior of society towards aging and related phenomena, like health and death, as well as their changes, variations, and constancies over time, along with the course of artistic creativity. The arts “effectively capture the times, joys and troubles of old age, and reveal valid insights into the situation of the elderly over time,” assert Achenbaum and Kusnerg. Depictions of old people in Rembrandt’s self-portraits and Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, record the physical, sensory, and mental losses of aging, together with its stability and gains. Literature and other artistic works touch on the views of the old, their involvement or disengagement with life, and the relationships between old men and women as well as between the old and the young. As McKee and Kauppinen put it, “Western art expresses the challenges, satisfactions, sorrows, and joys in the human experience of growing old.” The portrayal of aging in the arts, together with the art of elderly artists, the biographies on and by old artists, even musical lyrics, together with the reactions of elderly non-art audiences to works of art, bear on late-life psychological development. Paintings of aging figures, according to McKee and Kauppinen, anticipated, generated, and supported formal studies of old age, including the nature of physical decline, cognitive development, and emotional, social, and spiritual growth. Other relevant research areas to which art pertains are the treatment of aging as an integral part of the life-span or as limited to a particular period of life, the aged’s reactions to the passage of time and to death as passive or active, and old age as a productive or nonproductive time of life.11 Late-life creativity, in particular, has been examined in the context of the arts. The predominant view, initiated by the extensive research of Lehman in the 1950s, was that creativity, at least among historical figures, peaked relatively early in life, declined during the middle years, and disappeared by old age. The decline model,

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though, is challenged by the continued creativity of a relatively small but substantial number of artists and the sustained productivity of many aging (80+) painters of historical fame (Bernini, Bernard, de Kooning, Donatello, Dubuffet, Léger). Questionnaires completed by living visual artists over age 70, too, reported that neither the quality nor quantity of their work decreased with age. Instead, the artists wrote that both the quantity and quality of their work increased (although the latter was greater than the former). Related to late-life creativity is the old-age style, a shift in artistic expression by an estimated 20% of long-lived (60+) and major artists (Eakins, Goya, Klee, Mondrian, Monet, Picasso). Interpreted by some as a sign of physical and sensory decline, this was not the consensus of art experts, interviews of old artists, and the judgments of undergraduates who compared young and old paintings by elderly artists. The most salient descriptions of late-life paintings were their display of knowledge, energy, maturity, and self-acceptance. Late-life paintings were also differentiated, most notably, by their size. Large canvases encouraged aging artists to express themselves broadly, gave them freedom to play with undifferentiated shapes, and allowed light to be treated diffusely, all of which are acknowledged features of the old-age style. Aging non-artists’ reactions to abstract and representational art also tell psychologists something about old age. Older non-artists, as is typical, took longer to respond to art than younger (college-age) observers. The old needed more time, according to spontaneous comments, not because of sensory losses and mental debilities, as is usually assumed. Instead, delays reflected a willingness, even eagerness, to dwell on the thoughts and feelings evoked by the artistic works, and to find the right words to capture them. Except for the time needed to react, the study demonstrated that the older group judged abstract and representational paintings about the same as younger viewers did on judgments of their complexity, meaningfulness, and a range of other qualities. With respect to arts-related behavior, like playing musical instruments, composing poetry, and writing stories, older individuals (in their 60s to 80s) reported fewer such activities than younger respondents (20s to 40s). However, older respondents attended musical concerts and visited art museums at the same or greater frequency than younger individuals. What the study showed, in the case of the arts at least, is that aging brings both losses and gains as well as some stability.12 The studies of old artists and old art, late-life creativity, and aging non-artists’ responses to the arts, including their activities in the arts, challenge the pervasiveness of the decline model of aging. Instead, the findings support a continuity model, a sustained rather than a diminished quality to growing old — at least with respect to the arts. It may be that decline is the rule in other areas of life, but with respect to the arts, at least, a sizeable number of aging artists and non-artists show stability, and for artists with an old-age style there are gains. More generally, these


investigations demonstrate that hypotheses that originate in psychology (often with roots in art history, literary criticism, and other areas of the humanities) can be tested with art, artists, and art experts as well as with non-artists shown art and asked about activities in the arts. The results, even more broadly, support a positive perspective on late-life psychological development, show that the arts are a part of successful aging, contribute to an optimum old age, and promote an optimistic assessments of growing old. Encouraging signs, indeed, for an increasingly aging population. These investigations, although mainly of old painters, paintings, and non-artists’ reactions to paintings, are also applicable to old musicians, the music of aging composers, and elderly concert audiences as well as the literature of old age, senior writers, and readers of old age, and in fact to any kind of late-life art, long-lived artists, and arts audiences over 60. The studies also serve as a template for the study of elderly scholars, scientists, and other aging professionals as well as nonartists who begin a second career late in life. The arts, arts materials, and arts audiences are therefore useful adjuncts to traditional studies of late-life psychological development that typically rely on non-art materials and non-artistic participants. To sum up: Common to the various psychologies of the arts are three major components: the artist, the arts audience, and the artistic work. The study of each touches on an array of psychological phenomena: cognitive, affective, social, and the like. The arts, moreover, share notable features with each other, such as the topics they cover (creativity) and the methods they rely on (experiments). The various arts, furthermore, play several important roles in psychology, the most prominent of which is illustrative, but also as materials with which to test ideas and challenge facts. These points are exemplified by studies of imagery and aging in the context of the arts. Notable distinctions also differentiate psychology in general from the psychology of art: art is non-utilitarian as well as prototypical, extraordinary examples of the ordinary. Art is also quintessentially experiential. The psychology of art is also distinguished by two major approaches: the scientific and the clinical. These two contrasting views, as they apply to the arts, are discussed in the next chapter along with the strengths and weaknesses of each, and this book’s preference for the scientific approach.

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chapter 3

Competing psychological approaches to the arts Clinical and scientific The psychology of art is characterized by two sharply divergent approaches. On one side is the clinical or “therapeutic” viewpoint, which is represented by psychoanalytic (Freudian and neo-Freudian), Jungian, and psychiatric positions, or what might be more generally called psychodynamic psychology. On the opposite side of the ledger is the scientific or empirical perspective, which emphasizes objectivity (public, observable, replicable) and quantification (numbers, averages, statistics). Thus, the term “psychology” in the “psychology of art” is ambiguous, for it could refer to either one of two clearly contrasting positions. The distinction between the two is discussed in this chapter, with more attention paid to the scientific approach.

An overview For most, the “psychology of art” means Freudian psychology and its associations to “the mad artist,” the self-destructive painter, the Bohemian musician, the alcoholic writer, the suicidal poet, and more generally, unhappy creative (and non-creative) people with dysfunctional childhoods, pathological parents, and disturbed adulthoods. Studies that take the clinical approach to the arts, in short, are preoccupied with mental illness, maladjustment, and abnormality. Bizarre, unusual, and unconscious forces, moreover, determine the choice of art as a profession as well as the medium used, along with its content and style. These factors, too, account for audiences’ responses to artistic works. Such claims are based, as in clinical analyses of non-artists, on in-depth case studies that include self-reports, introspective accounts, probing questions, prompts to remember, and anecdotes along with a close reading of biographies, journals, diaries, letters, and other written accounts by artists, and a thoughtful examination of artistic products. In contrast, the scientific psychological approach to art, following standard empirical research methods, objectively looks for universal phenomena that are common to all artists, artistic works, and arts audiences, are not limited to any particular artist, work, or observer of art, and holds for non-artists, non-artistic works, and non-art audiences as well.

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Consider how the two approaches might deal with Madame Bovary in Flaubert’s novel of the same name, a work that has intrigued and gripped generations of readers. From the clinical perspective, one might begin with the author’s early childhood and his relationship with parents, probably emphasizing the mother’s role more than the father’s. Certain crucial early events in Flaubert’s life, Oedipal in nature, hint at his choice of this particular woman, theme, and treatment. The work’s impact on readers, a clinician is likely to maintain, is grounded in their unconscious identification with the heroine (for women) or the titillating notion of adultery (for men). As evidence, illustrative examples would be taken from Flaubert’s other fictional works and biographical writings, along with extrapolations from known facts about his life. This (hypothetical) study would be presented in dramatic language with the aim of convincing readers. Generalizations based on this imaginary study might be applied to authors in general, all people, society at large, and perhaps human history if not the development of civilization itself. A scientific approach to Madame Bovary, on the other hand, is likely to concentrate on a general treatment of adultery in a range of literary sources in order to establish its incidence in literature. To this end, passages on adulterous behavior from Madame Bovary and other French novels by different authors would be collected along with similar German, Russian (e.g. Anna Karenina), and American works written in the same time period as well as earlier and later ones. Adulterous behavior across multiple literary examples and in different countries, over an extended span of time, would be compared to the frequency of this behavior in the general population in France, Germany, Russia, and America, as well as in different eras. They serve as baselines against which to weigh the extent to which adulterous behavior in literature is over- or underemphasized compared to the norm. Literary examples of male infidelity, for comparison purposes, would also be surveyed. The relevant literary material in this invented scientific study, moreover, would be selected by a panel of expert judges and rated according to a pre-established checklist on who was adulterous to whom under what circumstances. The results of this make-believe study — call it “The Incidence of Gender Differences in Adultery in Literary Materials Across Nationality, Time, and Place” — would be tabulated, graphically displayed in tables and graphs, and offered in support of some tentative hypothesis (subject to further testing) on the persistent appeal of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Related themes in literature, say alcoholism and suicide, could also be examined in a similar manner in order to determine the prevalence of other kinds of socially disapproved behavior. Correlations would also be sought between these themes in literary works and their (rated) appeal to readers. Psychology as a science and as a clinical practice therefore differ in what they look for, the methods to find it, the outcomes, and their interpretations. The scientific perspective emphasizes the cognitive, rational, and conscious while the

Chapter 3. Competing psychological approaches to the arts

clinical perspective looks primarily to the emotional, irrational, and unconscious. Not surprisingly, the two psychologies arrive at widely divergent conclusions about the arts, artists, and arts audiences (and matters unrelated to the arts as well). For scientific psychology, differences between the arts, artists, and arts audiences and non-art materials, non-artists, and non-arts audiences are matters of degree, not of kind; similarities rather than differences are emphasized. For clinical psychology, an important goal is to understand a particular artist, a unique work of art, and the special characteristics of arts audiences; differences are of greater interest than similarities. Put another way, clinical psychology examines art “from above” (top/ down). The clinician, figuratively and literally, “looks down at the patient on the couch” (art, artist, arts audience). The therapist begins with and stays close to art in all its complicated, subjective, and personal aspects (top/down). In contrast, a scientific perspective begins with and builds up “from below” (bottom/up), starting from the laboratory in the “basement of the science building,” so to speak, looking up at more complex levels of mental life and behavior. A scientific psychology of art, furthermore, concentrates on what is studiable about artistic works, artists, and audiences. That is, relatively simple phenomena related to the arts are investigated under the highly circumscribed and controlled setting of the laboratory or similarly restricted circumstance (a testing room, a structured interview). For purposes of scientific expediency, materials are often simplified to the point where they are no longer recognizable as art, qualities exacerbated by the study’s setting (the lab rather than the concert hall) and participants (college freshmen, not professional artists). However, as knowledge grows, incrementally and slowly, art-aswe-know-it emerges — which is the point at which the clinical approach begins. Each perspective, clinical or scientific, has its dedicated and staunch proponents and vigorous and combative opponents. Both are skeptical if not derisive of the other’s view — if not ignoring it. Proponents of the clinical approach accuse those who follow the scientific method, with its preoccupation for fact-finding, of “anal compulsiveness,” while scientists label the airy overgeneralizations of their opponents as “soft- or muddle-headed.” An integration of the two viewpoints does not appear likely, at least in the near future. The competing roles of the two in the psychology of art can be better appreciated by a closer look at their historical origins, major themes, and strengths and weaknesses.

The clinical psychological approach to the arts The clinical approach to the arts goes back at least to Aristotle and his concept of catharsis, a term that refers to the emotional tension released by watching tragedies, listening to music, and indeed, when experiencing any kind of art. The

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connection between madness and creativity in art also has early origins.1 The contemporary clinical perspective, though, begins with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) who around the end of the 19th century developed a psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, dreams, and childhood. Few artists, though, were actually treated by Freud. Instead, he drew on the historical record to speculate about such illustrious artists as Leonard de Vinci and Michelangelo, and used well-known examples from the arts, especially fables and myths, to illustrate psychoanalytic themes among the non-artists he actually treated in his clinic. The Oedipus complex, named after a character in a Greek drama, and descriptive of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is the best known example. Freud also conjectured about the mixture of fascination and outrage often felt towards art and artistically creative people. The Freudian argument, in broad terms, runs as follows. Artists walk a thin line between normality and pathology, an underlying tension that fuels creativity. Consequently, there is a precarious balance between rational and irrational forces, conscious and unconscious demands, and impulsively primordial forces from the id and a compulsively obsessive superego. The anguish of artists and creative people in general is tempered by compromises, albeit made with difficulty, by a reasonable and reasoning ego. Troubled and disturbed artists keep overwhelming wishes and unrealistic desires at bay, but barely, the Freudian argument continues, by creating works of art that serve as safe outlets for impulses that would otherwise burst out of control. Onto these seemingly acceptable artistic fantasies, audiences safely project their own burdensome anxieties, irresolvable conflicts, and unbidden pressures. In the final analysis, the origins of art, the roots of artistic creativity, and the reactions to art are defensive subterfuges against repressed childhood experiences. Art is disguised irrationality, artists teeter on the edge of losing control, and audiences dabble with dangerous images. Non-Freudian positions also exist on the psychology of art, most notably Jungian “depth” psychology, but it is the Freudian thesis, along with its post-Freudian variants, that dominates the clinical approach, scholarly discussions, and critical reactions. The public, too, is impressed by Freudian analyses, perhaps because they are written in a narrative style that matches the bold, dramatic, insightful, and compelling works of art on which they are based. Publications on Shakespeare the man, his plays, and their characters illustrate clinical preoccupations.2 The titles of nearly 200 published articles in the subject indices of the exhaustive bibliography by Kiell, covering approximately the first half of the 20th-century, referred to about 60 themes. Most were about the abnormal, extreme, and unusual: nearly half (28) covered psychopathology and another quarter dealt with the unconscious and the psychosexual stages of development; and the remainder dealt with a variety of relatively neutral topics (love, myths, dreams, fantasies). The articles were distributed fairly evenly between Shakespeare the play-


wright and the characters in his plays. Among the latter, pathological topics were more abundant (79%) in the tragedies than in the histories and comedies; and among the tragedies, Hamlet received the most attention (38%). The Danish prince, together with Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, accounted for 72% of the citations. Clinical accounts, like those alluded to above, are sympathetically viewed by artists. Like clinicians, they too reflect on the imponderables of human nature, the untidiness of subjective phenomena, and the richness of experience in all its murky, vague, idiosyncratic and mysterious ways. Indeed, clinical psychology is often said to be an “art.” More directly, the arts are used in art therapy. Patients work with paint, music, and other materials (clay), write or tell stories, read poetry (bibliotherapy), and participate in drama (psychodrama), dance, and other expressive activities. These imaginative activities encourage self-revelations, open up lines of communication between therapists and clients, and supplement traditional forms of (talking) therapy. They also provoke spontaneous comments and behaviors, which are especially useful for inarticulate patients such as autistic children and schizophrenics who are unable or unwilling to talk about themselves and their problems. Many scholars who write about the arts also favorably view clinical explications, in part because case studies of the clinic parallel their discursive arguments. Art historians, musicologists, and literary critics, just as clinicians do, depend on the intensive study of one or a few works and artists. Like clinical treatments, scholarly analyses are subjective, intuitive, private, and supported by examples, often from the same fables, myths, paintings, and other artistic materials discussed by clinicians. Scholarly analyses of art, artists, and arts audiences, like clinical reports, depend on dramatic and compelling language to move readers towards a favored conclusion. Both clinical and scholarly approaches reflect, as well, the individualistic styles of their authors, which often echo the audacity of art and the idiosyncrasies of the artists they write about. Like clinical psychologists, scholars rely on introspective accounts of their own experience of art and speculations about the minds of artists and the motives of art audiences. No wonder humanists who write about the arts are very much aware of, influenced by, and responsive to Freudian analyses. For these scholars and clinicians as well, the uncertainties, risks, and biases of subjectivity are rarely questioned or acknowledged. Like clinicians, scholars are unapologetic about the (unstated) limits of their approach to the arts, and make little effort to minimize or avoid biases. Few if any procedural details are spelled out, quantification is absent or minimal, and observations are highly selective. Have exceptions been left out? No matter. The possibility of achieving if not approaching objectivity is doubted if not denied. Few scholars are interested in finding a common ground among divergent views, reaching a modicum degree of

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consensus, or indeed, believe that any such agreement is possible, worth the effort, or even desirable. Like clinical interpretations, scholarly discussions of the arts can be breathtaking, fascinating, insightful, brilliant, and contentious. As might be expected, serious objections are raised against the clinical approach. Its analyses, after all, are based on “ill” patients, small in number, and rarely artists. Those who suffer mentally are a special segment of the population and hardly representative of artists, or indeed, typical or “normal” members of society. When all is said and done, the clinicians’ sweeping pronouncements about artists and the arts, although often informed, intelligent, and clever, are extrapolations from the introspections, memories, and experiences of a relatively few disturbed patients. The purpose of the clinic, after all, is to help people, not to uncover facts about the arts or reach generalizations about artists, goals that are incidental to the therapist’s main purpose, which is to make unhealthy and maladjusted people better. Clinicians are not engaged in a disinterested inquiry into the psychological nature of the arts but in understanding, interpreting, and treating people with mental problems. These goals are not the same as those of artists, arts audiences, of the arts in general, of scholars, or scientific psychologists. The clinical perspective, say its detractors, is obsessed with primitive, negative, and irrational forces, with blind instincts fueled by drives out of control, with raw emotions run amuck. The admirable achievements of creative artists and the accolades accorded them by the public are fortuitous; masterpieces of art and great artists arise from mean, alien, destructive, and hostile forces. The monuments of art, artistic genius, and audience adulation are illusions; what is really going on is hidden. The origins of magnificent works of art, special abilities of artists, and sublime reactions of arts audiences are the seeping residue of unacceptable fantasies and ugly traumas rooted in immature and unresolved childhood conflicts. Clinicians therefore commit the “genetic fallacy,” attributing artistic and creative accomplishments of gifted adults to events in their childhoods. Ultimately, the psychology of art, from a clinical perspective, is neither sanguine nor benign, optimistic or positive. The limitations of the Freudian view were summed up by Elms, whose objections to psychoanalytic studies of psychobiographies are applicable to the Freudian approach to art in general. [L]eaving psychobiography largely to psychoanalysis and their disciples has not yielded a coherent, cumulative, consistently responsible discipline …. Psychoanalytic contributions may have been a necessary part of [early] development …, but they are not a sufficient base for … continued development. An infusion of research-trained psychologists, skilled in diverse approaches to the study of human behavior, can remake and reinvigorate the field.3

Or as Shakespeare has Othello say, “Be sure of it, give me ocular proof.” More generally, the clinical approach suffers from a flawed methodology. Fanciful explo-


rations of the arts, artists, and arts audiences, like interpretations of patients’ reflections, are not open to correction or verification from neutral observers. The clinician’s questioning of patients-cum-artists rest to an unknown degree on unstated, unknown, unchecked, and unconscious prejudices and preconceptions that influence, to an unknown degree, patients’ replies. Many of these criticisms apply to scholarly interpretations of art that are infused with the Freudian perspective. Often unstated , for example, are the criteria that lead scholars to discuss or exclude certain works, artists, and arts audiences. Little or no justification or details are given for choosing some artistic materials and not others. Absent, too, is the way artistic materials were examined in reaching certain conclusions. To what extent were supporting arguments marshaled and contrary information omitted? To an unknown degree, conclusions may be onesided and unbalanced. When the methods of analysis and procedures are absent or scant, then the adequacy of a scholar’s interpretation, like that of the clinician’s, cannot be independently judged. Have competing views and opposing positions been fairly and completely aired? Are alternative interpretations presented, contrasted, and weighed? If other scholars undertook a similar study of the same material would they reach similar conclusions? These questions remain unanswerable, and worse, resistant to clarification since the evidence on which a particular line of reasoning was based, and the lines of reasoning themselves, are neither explicit nor made available. In this regard, Martindale’s complaints against literary critics who ignore the facts, and by extension, scholars in general, are worth quoting. He argues that “psychologists have done thousands of studies of creativity and thousands of studies of how personality relates to textual content. These studies should be of great interest to scholars studying literature [but they] are completely unaware of [them].” To support this accusation, Martindale searched through the publications of PMLA, the leading journal of literary studies, and “not once did I see any of the studies [on creativity and personality in relation to textual content] cited.” He also charged that “to study poetics or even be a literary critic, one should have a good basic knowledge of psychology and sociology …. Few scholars in departments of literature have a good background in either scientific psychology or sociology.4 Thus, the shortcomings of scholarly discussions of art derived from the clinical approach are seldom recognized.5 When they are, they seem to be of little concern. Openness to public inquiry is not as prized in the humanities as it is in the sciences. The clinical view, not the scientific one, is the predominant if not the only kind of psychology that receives a hearing among many scholars despite its numerous faults. The therapeutic perspective is also the most well known among artists and laypersons with any kind of interest in the arts. It also holds a central place in the psychology of literature, more than it does in the psychology of paintings and music (Chapter 5).

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To be fair, though, some clinicians and scholars are cognizant of the failures of psychoanalysis, recognize its lack of rigor and other methodological shortcomings, and are knowledgeable about scientific psychology. Further, not all clinical viewpoints are as bleak as the overview sketched here. Cognitive and rational therapies, ego psychology, and clinicians like Adler, Erikson, Horney, Sullivan, Rogers, and Maslow assign more weight to conscious phenomena, the ego, and healthy drives than traditional therapies do. However, their influence on the psychology of art is considerably less than the Freudian position and its variants (orthodox-, neo- and post-Freudian).6 Despite its conceptual and methodological limitations, to its credit, the clinical approach to the arts is provocative, revelatory, suggestive, pervasive (and persuasive), and prominent. Notwithstanding these attractive features, the criticisms leveled against it are serious. Consequently, its claims have to be taken cautiously, as provisional, and subject to correction. Guarded acceptance is more than the scientific approach to the arts receives, a view that carries considerably little weight in scholarly circles and public awareness.

Scientific psychology and the arts Like scientific psychology and science in general, a scientific psychology of the arts spells out, in meticulous detail, the rigorous procedures of a study, especially the circumstances under which the results were obtained, in order to ensure replication and to note limitations to be remedied in future research. The ideal is the laboratory experiment in which stringent conditions (controls) are imposed on the type of art studied, the number of examples used, the kinds of artists and types of works included, the amount of time the material was presented, and other variables like the types of art and when they were produced. The research setting is controlled, too, with extraneous variables and unwanted distractions eliminated. Participants are carefully screened (controlled) with respect to age, gender, education, and other possibly relevant dimensions like interest in and experience with art. Care is also taken in selecting non-artists (the so-called control group — another use of the word “control”). Pre-tested instructions are read by (or to) participants on what to look at, listen to, or do. In longitudinal research, the research subjects are tested, observed, and measured over weeks if not longer. These ideals, however, are rarely achieved in any one study, especially in the arts, given the complexities of the materials and the responses they receive. How does one “control” (manage, account for, specify) the objects, shapes, and colors in an abstract painting where each splash is special? How select passages across literary works that are equivalent in length and word difficulty, let alone in content and style, as would be needed in the hypothetical example of the Madame Bovary


study discussed earlier? Consequently, experimental studies in the arts are not as frequent as other kinds of empirical studies. Instead, viewers of art, listeners to music, and readers of stories fill out questionnaires on their reactions to or attendance at artistic events, rate their interest in and degree of participation in the arts, rank their preferences for musical selections, types of art, or forms of literature, sort examples of art from least to most complex, and fill out tests of personality or intelligence that will be related to their responses to art. Whatever empirical path is taken, controls are in place for describing the characteristics of art, the settings in which they are shown, heard, or watched, and the nature of participants whose reactions are painstakingly recorded. The biases of the investigator, to the extent they are known, are made explicit, acknowledged, minimized or compensated for by the way the research is designed and the kinds of controls (and control groups). The extent to which errors were successfully eliminated is indicated by replicating the study, an effort that depends on the public nature of research. That is, the kinds of materials and participants are spelled out and the setting and procedures are described. This openness — which is what is meant by saying a study is “objective” — makes it accessible to those who might have doubts or questions and permits the findings and interpretations to be evaluated, criticized, challenged, and improved. Thus, the meaning, significance, and relevance of a study — its value— can be judged fairly because we know how it was done. If the original results are not repeated, this signals that something was wrong with the original study. Alternatively, a failure to replicate could mean that the phenomenon was more complex than initially believed and that the study omitted something important. Rarely, if ever, though, does a single scientific study of art (or any other topic) fulfill every scientific criterion or do so perfectly. However, corrections and improvements can be made in subsequent studies. Thus, replications and follow-up are the rule in scientific research. This is why many studies address the same p henomenon. Whatever method of research is pursued, the presence and extent of quantification is the most obvious distinction between scientific and clinical approaches to the arts. Scientific studies of the arts, like other scientifically tackled topics, feature numbers and their ancillaries: graphs, tables and statistical probability statements on the likelihood of the results being due to chance or random factors. In addition, relatively large numbers are the rule, whether of artists, non-artists, or works of art. In contrast, non-scientific approaches typically rely on one or a few artists or artistic examples. For scientific studies of the arts, quantification is, de rigueur, a necessity. Numbers distinguish, in the purest and starkest of terms, the scientific approach to the arts from the qualitative, subjective, and discursive opinions of the clinic, scholar, artist, and public. Numbers summarize and highlight, specify and denote, and act as a shorthand preview of what is internal, hidden, and indirectly manifested, such as artistic creativity, the experience of art, and

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aesthetic feelings. Frequencies sum up the characteristics of many artists, multiple examples, large arts audiences, and voluminous records. Martindale’s deceptively simple study of the literary fame of poets is a brief but lucid example of the value of quantification. He counted the number of books written about (not by) 700 British, French, and Americans poets. From these tallies, Martindale determined that “A very large number of books are devoted to a very small number of authors.” In other words, relatively few poets receive most attention. Thus, Shakespeare accounted for about 27% of the 34,516 sources examined, followed at quite a distance by Milton (1,280, or 4% of the total) and Chaucer (1,096, 3%). The results may seem self-evident — now that the facts are in — but how many would have guessed them beforehand, been close to the actual numbers, and correctly named the poets in second and third place? (Most would probably have guessed Shakespeare as first.)7 Scientific exactness comes at a price. Anonymously grouped data couched in averages and correlations mask differences between unique artistic works, idiosyncratic artists, and diverse arts audiences. Lost are the special qualities of individual artistic works, the particular talents of outstanding artists, and the quixotic preferences of audience members. Gained, however, are the commonalities, the generalities that override unique characteristics. In addition, grouped data on different kinds of artists, art, and arts audiences can be easily compared. Individuality is not completely ignored, though. Selected quotes by artists, apt examples of art, and typical comments by audience members highlight the overall results, illustrate explanations, suggest new research possibilities, and point to further studies. A scientific psychological approach to the arts, despite the reasonableness of its strictures, is severely criticized by those who contend that artists, artistic materials, and responses to art cannot be meaningfully investigated under such unnatural and restrictive circumstances. Art is freewheeling, expressing the unbridled individualism of artists and the divergent tastes of its audience. The scientific method, critics charge, misses the quintessential features of art: its human, experiential, personal, and spontaneous qualities. Quantitative summaries of art, limited as they must be to observables, measureable reactions, and statistical translations, are unrecognizable as art. Numbers are no substitute for the personal feelings, intuitive leaps, and subjective nuances upon which art, artists and arts audiences depend, look for, and insist upon. The intrusive, manipulative, deterministic, mechanistic, and reductionistic straightjacket of empirical studies transform art, its participants, and their responses into artificial and simplistic “data” that bear little meaningful resemblance to their origins. Scientific inquiry assumes, unjustifiably, accordingly to its opponents, that the creative origins of art, the imaginative resources of artists, and the transformative reactions of audiences are knowable and predictable. Where, then, is the unstudiable, uncertain, and unknown on


which the arts thrive? The virtues of science, when applied to the arts, turn into vices, say its detractors. To be objective about art and artists misses their complexity; to insist on a quantitative posture overlooks qualitative subtleties; to search for generalizations ignores individuality; and to tabulate averages blurs multiple meanings. Restricted to studying only what is studiable, science is too conservative to take a chance on being wrong or worse, looking foolish, thereby skirting the very boldness that determines the excitement of art, the audacity of artists, and the curiosity of arts audiences. Timidity, say critics, is fatal when uniqueness, eccentricity, and risk-taking are the norm. The methodological restrictions of the scientific psychology of art, its opponents exclaim, exclude the hallmarks of art. The best that can be said about scientific excursions into art is that they prove the obvious. For the poet and critic Stegner, “It would be the wildest folly to think of reducing art to the laws and the orderliness that are the ideal and monumental strength of science. Only a philistine would even attempt it. For art reduced to law and order is only a cliché.” 8 Paradoxically, some scientists, too, have looked askance at the scientific psychology of the arts, repeating many of the same criticisms made by clinical, humanistic, and public voices. The characteristics of art, artists, and the reactions of art audiences, say scientific critics, are too personal, individualistic, and covert to be specified, controlled, and measured in the way science demands. Consider what works of art present to audiences. A painting has colors, forms, and subjectmatter; a musical piece has a structure and melodic themes; a story has plot and characters. Each component simultaneously evokes perceptions, memories, feelings, and attitudes. Can these be disentangled, specified, and connected? No, say skeptical scientists. Empirical studies of the arts are doomed to failure because too much error is possible; they lack controls. Compared to the results obtained with simpler stimuli (nonsense forms and syllables) and uncomplicated responses (“yes-no”), compliant subjects (undergraduates, rats), and conventional settings (sound-proofed and light-controlled laboratories and testing rooms), the data from empirical studies of the arts are not “clean.” The scientific psychology of art, say strict upholders of the canon, depends on tasks and settings that cannot meet the highly controlled requirements of rigorous laboratory study. To achieve that ideal, minimally meaningful materials are necessary: artificial, isolated, simplified, unfamiliar, ordinary, and uncontextualized. Simplification means “good” data, argue stringent advocates of the scientific method. Studies of overly complicated phenomena, like art, are therefore compromised. In other words, the qualities that make art attractive cannot be placed within the framework of empirical inquiry. Experimental aesthetics is an exception; it is “real science.” But at a price. It is not, for the most part, about real art since it relies on surrogates, such as visual forms (for paintings), pitch (for music), and consonants (for literature). It is an approach

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to the arts “from below” that attempts to build up from non-art to real art but the result is a “sideways” glance. The study of non-art materials, participants, and settings only indirectly hint at actual art. Scientists who hold experimental aesthetics as the ideal take a limited view of the possibilities of an empirical psychology of art. They have, as Wilson put it, “dissociated [the arts] from the empirical study of the springs of human behavior,” thereby further fueling the disdain of critical clinicians and skeptical humanists.9 What’s left, then, are clinical expositions of the arts, and these are preferred by scholars, humanists, art historians, artists, and the general public over scientific evidence. The latter rarely receives any consideration in developing, supplementing, buttressing, or questioning clinical suppositions, scholarly assumptions, artistic accounts, or personal feelings about the arts. There is a general wariness towards quantifying the arts, a bristling at the notion of applying numbers to artistic experience. Counting misses the point, it seems, when juxtaposed against the elegance of artistic phenomena. Consequently, artists, scholars, and laypersons largely ignore the scientific psychological approach to the arts despite its reliability (consistency) and validity (accuracy). Being right does not necessarily mean being read. No matter how cogent the scientific arguments, they are ignored. The clinical psychological approach to the arts, despite its doubtful reliability and questionable validity, and with a reputation for mistaking obscurity and “foggy ruminations” for depth, nonetheless receives a hearing in the humanities, even if not always a respectful one, and an enthusiastic reception from nonprofessionals, while the more “correct” scientific stance is disregarded. 10 Revelatory clinical insights about the arts, delusional though they may be for many, are seductive. The scientific study of the arts and its sharp differences with the clinical approach, and the antagonism which often greets it, have their roots in the history of psychology, sketched next. One of the first scientific psychological efforts was the search for types, of which the aesthetic type was one. The German philosopher and psychologist Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) asserted that people fell into one of six major types. The aesthetic type assigns a high priority to beauty, centers his or her life on good books, art, and music, and engages in activities related to the arts. (The five other types are the social, political, religious, economic, and theoretical.) Spranger’s typology gained prominence when it became the basis for a widely used test of personality, the Allport, Vernon, and Lindzey Study of Values, where respondents indicated their preferences for different kinds of activities, including the aesthetic, to which numerical scores were assigned to establish individuals’ relative standing on each of the six values. Another early example of typologies is Binet’s (1857– 1911), the French psychologist better known for his contribution to the study of intelligence. His typology differed from Spranger’s with respect to the number of


types and their labels but the aesthetic type was among those included. Typologies are still part of some contemporary tests (e.g. Myer-Briggs) but none that I know of is directed to aesthetics or the arts.11 Matters related to the arts were also of some interest to the first “school” of psychology, the Introspectionists, whose goal was the detailed description of the contents of the mind through introspection. To this end, the Introspectionists attempted to catalog the mental elements of consciousness, among which were artistic experience and aesthetic awareness, including the “distancing effect,” which takes place when experiencing an artistic event. As discussed at length in philosophy, “aesthetic distance” refers to a simultaneous feeling of immersion in an artistic event and at the same time a sense of removal or distance from which the experience is examined. I react to a work of art and at the same time I observe my reaction. 12 The influence of typologists, Introspectionists, and other psychologists who gave prominence to artistic experience, along with consciousness, the mind, and mental phenomena in general, waned if not almost disappeared from scientific psychology by the mid-twentieth century. Proponents of the importance of conscious experience could not agree on the content of mental life or how to resolve disagreements. Uncertainties about mental phenomena, which did not disturb Freudian approaches to art, were resolved rather crudely in scientific psychology by ignoring them, the option taken by the Behaviorists. They replaced covert internal experiences (mental phenomena) with overt external responses (behavior). The scope of psychology was narrowed further by the flourishing of the conditioning model of learning and more generally the adoption of a molecular stimulus-response (S-R) psychology. With Behaviorism ascendant, mental life was marginalized if not scorned, including phenomena related to the arts. Experimental aesthetics, however, remained because it was in keeping with the spirit of behaviorism. It took a reductionist approach to artistic stimuli, defined them narrowly (paintings as patches of color, music as frequencies of sound), as were reactions to art (ratings and rankings), and with both artistic stimuli and artistic responses connected by the precise mathematical formulations of psychophysics. Fechner (1801–1887), already mentioned as a key early figure in conceptualizing experimental aesthetics, and one of the founders of the new science of psychology, was interested in the beautiful, good, pleasing, and satisfying, and by extension the evaluation of art, or more generally, preferences for stimuli of any sort. What makes certain objects — artistic or otherwise — liked? For experimental aesthetics, the answer lay in simplifying artistic stimuli, that is, reducing works of art to their basic components: patches of color (paintings), isolated notes (music), and uncontextualized syllables (literature). Surrogates for art were therefore investigated, not art itself; the latter was not considered to be scientifically manageable. Experimental aesthetics survived the demise of Behavior-

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ism, continues to represent the scientific psychology of art, and is more frequently applied to paintings and music than literature, although it still remains true to its relatively narrow agenda.13 The denial if not the disparagement of experience, the rejection of mental processes, the depreciation of introspective self-reports, and the simplification of artistic stimuli and responses just about ended the scientific study of artists, art, observers of the arts, and conscious phenomena in general, at least in the United States. The nature of artistic stimuli and the experiences they evoked were deemed too subjective and ambiguous to be captured through scientific psychology, at least when defined in behavioral terms, an issue that continues to plague empirical psychology and draws the ire of critics. A familiar story, readers will note. Gestalt psychology, another early movement in psychology, rejected reductionist strategies, whether adapted by Introspectionism, Behaviorism, or experimental aesthetics. Its major figures, Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1941), and Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), were suspicious of a psychology that was atomistic, molecular, and mechanistic. Instead, they championed the holistic features of experience, first in perception and then in other areas of psychology. Their rallying cry was “The whole is greater than — or different from — the sum of its parts.” No matter how a tune is played or sung, whether as a ballad or a jazzy rendition, and despite variations in notes and phrasing (the parts), the song is easily recognized (the whole). Despite radical changes in its elements, a song’s overall pattern, its Gestalt, remains the same. On the same principle, caricatures of well-known individuals are recognizable despite severe simplifications and major distortions in their facial features. Specific pieces of information (the nose and mouth) are modified, exaggerated, and altered, but the essential quality, its Gestalt or general pattern, remains intact; an overall impression is maintained. The Gestalt psychologists thereby returned conscious phenomena to the fore, gave prominence to the holistic and integrative character of experience, and laid the foundation for the subsequent “cognitive revolution” in contemporary psychology. More importantly, for our purposes, the experiences of artists and arts audiences became, once again, legitimate subjects of scientific inquiry. Consequently, the organizational or unifying principles of Gestalt psychology — similarity, proximity, closure, good continuation, figure-ground, pregnänz (the tension inherent in a stimulus) — were applied to paintings, literature, architecture, film, and literature. 14 The disparate elements of visual, auditory, and verbal art, as elsewhere, were unified by an active perceiver imposing order on otherwise unorganized material. Relevant to art, too, was the Gestaltists’ promotion of insight, direction, and fixedness in focusing perception, thinking, and problem-solving. Gestalt psychology was empirical but avoided its extremes and distortions, as experimental aesthetics failed to do, by not losing sight of the special qualities of art. It adopt-

Chapter 3. Competing psychological approaches to the arts 29

ed the openness and flexibility of clinical and humanistic approaches in order to encompass the extraordinary characteristics of the arts. Unfortunately, infusions of the Gestalt spirit in scientific psychological studies of the arts was not sufficient to offset scholarly criticisms. These are discussed in the next chapter.

chapter 4

The status of the scientific psychology of art Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say, what the use, were fewer optics giv’n, T’ inspect a mote, not comprehend heav’n? Alexander Pope

The arts and related areas, such as aesthetics and creativity, are vigorously and frequently investigated by scientific psychology, the results are reported at conventions and symposia and published in specialized journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Creative Research Journal, Empirical Studies of the Arts, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of Creative Behavior), and presented in handbooks, anthologies, collections, and textbooks. Several hundred members of the American Psychological Association (APA), a worldwide organization of psychologists, mainly academics, belong to Division 10, a specialized unit dedicated to the arts, aesthetics, and creativity. The arts, furthermore, are closely associated with the history of scientific psychology (Chapter 3). In short, the arts and its associated fields are an established part of scientific psychology. Yet their status is marginal. The number of psychologists sufficiently committed to teaching and research in the arts to become members of the afore-mentioned Division 10 is tiny, typically less than 500, in an organization of more than 150,000. In a history of the division, Martindale reported that in 1948, the earliest year for which APA has numbers, only 1.1% of the more than 5300 members at that time belonged to the Division, and that was “the highest percentage ever attained.” In 2005, the percentage plummeted to 0.65% and in 1986 it was an anemic 0.61%. The correlation between total APA membership and the percentage who are division members, he calculated, was negative. In the past, Martindale also noted, the topics of aesthetics, art, and genius (creativity) “were focal rather than peripheral concerns of psychology. Thus, virtually all of the early presidents of APA wrote something on them at least in passing.” 1 The scientific study of art, part of academic psychology for more than 100 years, has not thrived and lags far behind other areas of scientific psychology. The scientific approach to the arts is largely unknown in clinical approaches, unheard of by artists, barely unacknowledged in the humanities, and ignored by the general public (Chapter 3). In contrast, clinical-Freudian varieties have had and continue to have a major impact on the humanities, the arts, artists, humanities, and the public. The psychology of art means “the psychoanalysis of art” or the “Freudian approach to art,” rarely

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“the scientific” psychology of art. Empirical-quantitative approaches to art are largely unrecognized and unappreciated. Objections to clinical speculations are of relatively little weight when compared to the neglect of scientific precision. Several factors, some of which have already been mentioned, account for the marginal status of the scientific psychology of art, such as the difficulty of measuring and quantifying the appeal of art, the creativity of artists, and the experiences of arts audiences; and couching research findings in numerical terms (ratings, rankings, and similarly sparse quantitative indices) are anemic when compared to the real thing. Unsettling, too, are the simplifications of experimental aesthetics, the most rigorous of the scientific approaches to the arts. Seemingly misplaced, as well, is the belief that isolated studies of the bits and pieces that make up the arts, investigated “from below” through a reductionistic empirical method, will eventually add up to art as we know and experience it “from above.” Hence, Pope’s complaint in the introductory quotation. Raising hackles as well is the assumption that artistic experience, aesthetic feelings, and judgments of art are like any other kind of mental event, emotion, and evaluation, and that artists and the arts can be studied like ordinary persons and objects. Artistic matters, many claim, cannot be put under the same empirical microscope as everyday phenomena. Off-putting, in addition, are the sterile controlled settings in which scientific studies of the arts are conducted, rarely in the venues in which art is shown or takes place, the concert-halls, art museums, and stage. And who are the main research subjects? College undergraduates. The scientific psychology of art is condemned, additionally, for its fragmentation into a psychology of paintings, of music, of literature, and so on, and for splitting the field into the psychology of the artist, the audience, the work, and so forth. Thus the psychology of literature becomes the psychology of the writer, the reader, and the text, and the latter is further subdivided into the psychology of short stories, poetry, and the like. Such disjointedness is exacerbated by the truncated and terse style in which scientific findings about the arts are reported in professional journals, leaving little space for examples from art and discussions of a study’s broader meaning that might interest scholars, humanists, artists, and the general public. Faulted, too, is the extreme cautiousness, timidity some would say, for insisting on hewing closely to the facts and only the facts. Description precedes explanation, specifics come before generalizations, and details replace “the big picture.” Larger implications, if drawn, are offered tentatively, with much hedging, hemming, and hawing of the “on-the-one-hand” and “on-the-other-hand” sort. Unadventurous as well is the strategy of using art to illustrate what is already known, as a garnish to “prettify” the data. Rarely are the arts seen as a source of hypotheses, as anticipating what has not yet been studied, as a cutting edge to new knowledge, and as a guide into the unknown. The cautiousness of scientific endeavors contrasts

Chapter 4. The status of the scientific psychology of art

sharply with the adventurousness of the arts and artists. Then there is the thorny problem of what to do about the experience of art, whose richness is shoehorned into ratings, rankings, and other external indices that barely hint at the underlying phenomena that are supposedly being represented in shorthand form. One might well ask is a reader’s experience of a poem captured by a rating of “1” on a 1–5 scale of “liking”? Or whether an author’s reflections about his or her imagery is captured by a checklist of adjectives? Psychologists justify their wariness towards experiential phenomena in the arts (and elsewhere) by contending that self-reports are enigmatic, elusive, and ambiguous indicators of internal events. Moreover, reports about experience are incomplete, inaccurate, and distorted, as well as dependent on the willingness and ability of people to communicate openly, honestly, and fully. The problematic nature of experience has dogged psychology throughout its history, and not only in the arts. But the burden of examining, describing, and accounting for experience and related enigmas, like consciousness and awareness, and somehow circumventing and defusing the uncertainties of experience, seems heaviest in the arts where self-consciousness is preeminent and subjective and inner states are primary.2 Perplexities about the nature of experience, however, do not vex the clinical approach to art, where experiential phenomena are welcomed, not only for themselves, but more importantly, for what they hint about the unconscious, the non-experienced and non-experienceable. Scientific investigators, however, are loath (and often unwilling if not unable) to study the unexperienced. (One exception is physiological responses to art.) Instead, researchers take a circumspect glance at the faint and shadowy reflections of experience as they are manifested by ratings and other outward indicators of internal events. (Another exception is talking about art; words are quantifiable.) Critics consider a circuitous approach to art unexciting, or worse, shockingly indifferent to fascinating phenomena. These objections to the scientific psychology of art reflect the “two-cultures conflict,” which refers to the troubled relationship between science and the humanities, where border crossings are hindered by indifference, partisanship, and a lack of communication.3 Exchanges across disciplines are rare and tenuous, and when they take place, are deprecated if not rejected. Deep-seated interdisciplinary strains, rivalries, and fissures have a long history, are difficult to resolve, and continue to fuel tensions between science and the humanities. This larger conflict mirrors the clash between scientific and clinical approaches to the psychology of art. The solution, though, is not to abandon or compromise the effort, which would be a catastrophe. Rigor, thoroughness, and precision have proven valuable in other areas of psychology as well as in science, technology, business, finance, and just about everywhere else. The scientific point of view, in general and in psychology, has accomplished a great deal and there are many reasons to believe it could succeed in the

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arts as well. Acknowledging the limits of the scientific method is not to doom its future in the arts. No subject of scientific study, whether physics or psychology, is free from error and this is true of art even if it seems to have more than its share of difficulties, compared to, say, the neurophysiology of memory. An empirical approach to the arts can be challenged when it errs but mistakes can be corrected. Doing science is hard, even when the object of study is more passive and less reactive than artists, when the materials are more tractable and definable than art, and when the reactions of people are less subtle and subjective than those of audiences at arts events. There are, admittedly, many obstacles to overcome, but they are no excuse for ignoring extraordinary phenomena of great psychological significance, relegating the arts to the fringe of psychology, and considering them as merely “frostings on the cake,” as it were, of hardheaded scientific facts. Paintings, music, literature, dance, theater, and the rest, for many and often, enrich our experience, trigger profound feelings, jolt thinking, clarify understanding, influence behavior, and in general make a difference in people’s lives. Why else would governments attack (as well as promote) artists, celebrate (and censor) the arts, and use (and misuse) art for advertising and propaganda if they were not important? Art- making and art-appreciating are an integral part of our evolutionary-biological heritage.4 Artists, the arts, and the experience of art are too pervasive and important to be left out of science. Whatever else might be said of the arts, they are not psychologically inert. That said, it might be too much to hope that a scientific psychology of art will ever match the popularity and attractiveness of the clinical approach, or replace the depth and scope of inquiries in the humanities. Nor should we expect the highest ideals of scientific objectivity to be achieved in the arts, at least for the foreseeable future. But what field of scientific study can meet that goal? What area of psychology is without error? The virtue of a scientific approach is not its avoidance of error, as important as it is to minimize mistakes, but the ability to detect, correct, and reduce them, or failing that, to work around difficulties. The redeeming feature of a scientific psychology of art, whatever its limitations, is the possibility for improvement. If a study does not get it right the first time, as is almost always the case, then another study can be done, and still another, as many as needed to “get it right.” Scientific knowledge is not only self-corrective, but also cumulative, building on work that preceded it, including efforts that proved to be wrong, muddle-headed, and at a dead-end. Perfection is not the goal but rather an increasingly better approximation of the truth; there is no final answer that is forever true. A considerable amount of trial-and-error, back-pedaling, and stumbling is to be expected if the history of science is any guide. A watchful attitude makes sense when studying any complex area of psychology, whether it is thinking, emotions, social behavior — or art. Scientific efforts in the psychology of art will inevitably


fall short of the ideal, and the number of misses will outweigh the number of hits. Progress will be slow and incremental. But errors and omissions can be remedied; a single study is rarely if ever the best or last word. For these reasons, a scientific psychology of art is worth a serious hearing. Endless debates have centered on whether art can be “psychologized,” and if this is best done scientifically, clinically, or in some other way. However, the number of arguments pro and con one side or the other cannot simply be weighed in order to determine a “winner.” Armchair analyses of the merits and demerits of a particular approach to art, heated debates on the validity and generality of clinical or scientific accounts, and a barrage of supporting examples and debunking arguments from the humanities, artists, and the public in favor of or opposed to one or the other (or no) position, are abundant, welcome, and useful — up to a point. There has been sufficient debate. It is time to move on. Whatever needs to be said has already been said. Many times. How might the many thorny problems of the scientific psychological approach to art be minimized? Consider the following possible steps—subject to revision — towards resolving the experiential consequences of exposure to art. Assume for the moment that comments by artists and observers of art are fairly complete and relatively true, at least to some extent, under most circumstances, and in the majority of cases. Assume, too, at least a modest amount of fidelity between an artistic work, the stated intent of the artist who created it, and audiences’ reports of their experience of that work. To assume otherwise, and reject the possibility of a reasonable amount of overlap is to doubt the possibility of communicating anything and to reject the likelihood of meaningful exchanges between people in common settings to the same object or event. For most situations, when participants are neither hurried nor excited, and where the circumstances of seeing and hearing are optimal, as they usually are, we expect a reasonable match between what is experienced, said, and done. The same convergence should hold for the experiences of artists and audiences to artistic works — although there is considerable latitude for misunderstandings. But a scientific psychology of art can provisionally accept, subject to further checks, that what artists say about the art they create and people’s experience of that art reasonably correspond, or at least dovetail sufficiently to believe in some ties between them and that these can be at least partially uncovered. Artists and arts audiences may not tell us everything about their experience, and they may give us more or less than what they actually experience, including beliefs and guesses, but self-reports are often plausible at face value. What remains uncertain or questionable can be followed-up, corroborated, clarified, or refuted by studies with improved procedures, better materials, and additional checks. Facts, hypotheses, and concepts that emerge from studies of the experiential aspects of the arts, along with follow-up research, can be

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t ested in an ever-growing cycle of investigations that address doubts, inconsistencies, and contradictions. In these ways, scientific knowledge about and confidence in experiential facts grows. The experience of art is too important to be abandoned or neglected, has to be taken seriously, and deserves scientific study. Applicable here, and echoing the quotation by Pope again, is a warning by Beckler, Executive Director for Science, American Psychological Association, on the perils of biological reductionism: [There is a danger in psychology] of equating our understanding of the components [e.g., neuroscience, genetics] with understanding of the complex system itself [which] creates a false sense of advancement, a confusing of our understanding of the parts with our understanding of the whole [and consequently] advances will be small if we lose sight of the bigger picture — the complex systems in which neurons and genes operate, and through which they have been shaped …systems [that reflect] emergent properties that are more than the sum of smaller parts …. Everyone seems to think that focusing on ever finer grains of sand will hasten cures for the worst of human afflictions and produce enormous leaps forward in our understanding of the human condition.

A similar point, more directly about the omission of experiential phenomena, was made by Molden and Dweck. “The search for universal principles of human behavior …is …one of the primary goals of psychological science …. [but it] sometimes obscures how real people actually function. That is, by attempting to describe only the average, one runs the risk of describing nobody in particular …. Yet psychological science has (and should have) another primary goal as well: to understand how people give meaning to their experiences” (p. 192).5 The best strategy for the scientific psychology of the arts to take, as in any area of psychology where experiential phenomena are paramount, is to be circumspect, skeptical, and cautious. Interpretations and conclusions should be treated as tentative and subject to supplementary and converging proofs. Experiential phenomena, admittedly, are a problem for a scientific psychology of the arts, one of many. But they can be addressed and at least partially or temporarily solved until better studies come along. Other unsettled matters in the scientific psychology of art, like the place of quantification and its relationship to qualitative knowledge, can be resolved in a similar conciliatory manner. Whatever remains unfinished can be returned to at a later date when greater knowledge, better procedures, and more awareness of what needs to be unraveled become available. In increasingly less provisional ways, the scientific psychology of art can be improved and its critics mollified. In the final analysis, though, the merits of a scientific psychology of the arts have to be demonstrated. Does this approach offer new and useful information about art, artists, and arts audiences? Does it supplement clinical, intellectual,


humanistic, artistic, and public inquiries into the arts? Does it advance psychology in general by clarifying mental and behavioral phenomena? In other words, scientific psychological studies of the arts prove their worth when they broaden psychological studies, are taken into account by clinical interpretations, expand discussions in the humanities, influence artists, and augment the public’s appreciation of art. A tall order indeed but surely worth pursuing. Are such lofty goals possible? How else to know but try? A scientific-empirical-objective-quantitative approach to the arts proves itself when its place in the humanities, art, clinic, and public awareness increases. Tangible accomplishments, rather than more arguments and examples, are the best way to answer critics. What, then, might be the next step for enhancing the credibility of the psychology of art? In this book, I argue for a route that pursues a vigorous scientific psychology of literature that looks at literary content in its own right, as a source of knowledge that confirms, expands, and challenges the boundaries of psychology. Justifications for a scientific psychology of literature, many of which have been touched on in Chapters 1 and 2, but focusing on the content of literature, are discussed in the chapters that follow. But be forewarned. The difficulties of the scientific psychology of the arts, already noted as plentiful, pertain to the scientific psychology of literature, along with additional ones.

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part 2

The psychology of literature An overview

chapter 5

The psychology of literature Comparisons with other psychologies of art “Being youthful, it would be becoming [for psychology] to learn a few basic truths from literature.” 1

The psychology of literature, along with paintings, music, and the other arts, share a number of commonalities (Chapter 2), such as a keen interest in the creativity of artists. For example, among historical artists, creativity peaked later for authors, the 40s, than it did for painters and musicians, the 30s, although the age for authors depended on the particular literary forms, for instance, great novels were written earlier than major epics.2 A distinctions of note is the explicitness with which psychological phenomena are treated in literature compared to paintings and music. These differences are discussed later. But first I examine the numerous parallels between literature and the other arts.

Similarities between literature and the other arts Literary “classics” are matched by “museum-caliber” paintings and “serious” music. Popular literature (pulps, “potboilers,” trashy novels) is comparable to commercial paintings (lowbrow, popular, mass-produced art) and to “elevator,” “background,” and “filler” music. Novels are bestsellers and plays are sold-out, just as art exhibits are “blockbusters,” concerts are oversubscribed, and operas announce standing room only. Then again, novels are dispatched to the remainder bin, Broadway musicals close in a week, concerts are cancelled due to poor advance sales, and films “bomb” at the box office. Readers and arts audiences alike react to a work quickly, as when the first page or paragraph of a novel, sometimes the first line, “hook” readers (or discourage them), a brief glance at a painting “grabs” (or repels) viewers, and the opening bars of music alert concert-goers to a possibly interesting (or boring) evening. Experts disagree, tastes differ, and reputations wax and wane in literature as well as the other arts. The acceptance and popularity of a particular piece of literature, like all the arts, depend not only on its intrinsic worth but also on reviews, advertisements, and celebrity endorsements. Literature and the rest raise the same questions: What is it about a work that attracts some but not others? Why do only a few last and so many fade?

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There’s more in common. The literary and other arts are censored, burned, banned, and exploited as propaganda.3 Literary works, like all kinds of art, move people, transform ideas, change behavior, alter living conditions, and affect society. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle’s Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle come to mind, among many others (Voltaire’s Candide, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Kafka’s The Trial, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon). Popular, too, are novels and films about writers (Shakespeare, Zola) as well as painters (Da Vinci, van Gogh, Michelangelo, Toulouse Lautrec) and musicians (Chopin, Mozart, Thelonious Monk). Fascinating the public, too, is the presumed tie between creativity and “madness,” whether of authors (Sylvia Plath) or other artists (the aging Beethoven, van Gogh). Writers, like artists in general, are reputed to be more prone to suicide, alcoholism, and depression than the general population.4 The commonalities continue. The psychology of literature, like each of the arts, revolves primarily around three major components (Chapter 2): the artist (writer, poet, playwright, essayist, memoirist); the audience (reader, playgoer, listener to stories); and the work (the novel, short story, play, poem, essay, memoir, folkand fairy- tale). These three basic components are closely related, of course, and ideally, should be considered together along with social-cultural-historical influences. But practical necessities lead to the separate study of each. If literary content is of interest, then the role of the author and the reactions of readers are ignored, at least temporarily, minimized, taken for granted, or considered universal (writers in general, the general reader). Hence, reduction, isolation, and simplification are the rule in the psychology of literature as they are in other scientific psychological approaches to the arts. That said, considerably more attention is paid to the creativity of the writer than the literary reader and the literary work, a bias that favors artists in all the arts. Literature and the other arts also deal with a wide swath of psychological phenomena. Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, exemplifies ageism, youthful attitudes to the elderly, declines in health with increasing age, and the way mortality and death are faced.5 Similar themes are also depicted in paintings and more subtly in music, as in changes in creative expression (styles) between early and late works. Like any work of art, literature provokes ideas, stimulates hypotheses, and is a source of materials to test them.6 Art of all sorts, literature included, is an aesthetic siren call that prompts empirical curiosity. Paralleling the other arts, too, literature broadens and expands psychological studies of non-art by including artistic materials and artists. Just like the other arts, literature confronts the status quo, presents new and unexpected information, and suggests possibilities not yet formally studied, such as the old-age style and its incompatibility with the decline model of creativity (Chapter 2). Then, too, literature and the other arts invite psychological analysis, whether from the clinical or scientific perspective

Chapter 5. The psychology of literature

(Chapters 3). Reactions to literature, as for other artistic materials, are patently psychological as well: readers and other arts audiences attend, perceive, reflect, learn, understand, remember, interpret, evaluate, empathize, identify, imagine, search for meaning, call up images, experience aesthetic feelings, and more. 7 The scientific psychological study of literature, like the other arts, touches on a range of larger issues, including its amenability to rigorous study, the possibility of refutation, the danger of trivializing the phenomena studied (scientism), the complementary ways of knowing, and connecting art and science (interdisciplinarity). Like the arts in general, scientific psychological studies of literature are subject to constant revision and severe criticism, and their results are often rejected or ignored while clinical views prevail (Chapter 3). The psychology of literature, as is the case for every art form, depends on subjective and personal experience, or phenomenology, especially the sort that is salient across the arts, the physiognomic and synesthetic (also spelled synaesthetic).8 The physiognomic experience, most generally, refers to the immediate and spontaneous perception of the expressive qualities of people, objects, and events.9 In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the emotions depicted in the portrait of the main characer change incrementally with the increasing venality of its reallife subject. Less dramatic examples abound. In music, sounds and rhythms create and enhance a mood; in abstract art, colors and patterns arouse and sustain a feeling; in theater and dance, actors and dancers use gestures, vocalizations, and bodily movements to convey emotions and relationships. In literature, physiognomic reactions are evoked by descriptions of people, especially their eyes, mouth, and face (Chapter 10); and verbal cues in dialogue contain physiognomic overtones that hint at the inner state of a character. The weather, and physical descriptions of places, also carry affective resonances. The word “mountain” in a literary context, for example, triggers a physiognomic sense of awe and wonder, a feeling of impending danger. Yet the same word, on a literal and more prosaic level, denotes a specific object with a certain shape, size, mass, and other physical characteristics. Often working with physiognomy is synesthesia, in which stimulation of one sense (sound) evokes an experience in another sense (sight). A musical note is “bright” or “scratchy” (a sound-touch connection); colors in a painting are “warm”; an actor’s stance is “cold.” Words in literature have synesthetic connections, too. The writer Poe refers to “the sound of coming darkness” and “the murmur of the gray twilight.” Well known is Kipling‘s “Dawn comes up like thunder.” In the poetry of Tennyson, flowers “speak”: red roses cry, white roses weep, the larkspur listens, the lily whispers. In the classic Disney movie Fantasia, the music of Bach and Schubert fittingly accompany visual patterns, shapes, and colors. In the same film, synesthetic effects generated by the music of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” augment Mickey Mouse’s physiognomic feelings of danger, of things out of

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control, of panic, of a struggle to overcome. Consider again the ordinary word “mountain” in a literary context. Its “brooding” (physiognomic) quality is paralleled and enhanced by a (synesthetic) suggestion of “coldness” and “roughness” together with perhaps a sense of mistiness and grayness.10 The physiognomic and synesthetic properties of literature will appear again (Chapters 7–8, 10).

The distinctive features of the psychology of literature Literature and the other arts therefore share a number of commonalities. But substantial differences exist as well, some to the empirical advantages of literature, others to its detriment. For the poet Auden, the language of literature, compared to the forms of communication in the other arts, is deceptively ordinary. “Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because their medium, language, is not like the paint of the painter or the notes of the composer, reserved for their use, but is the common property of the linguistic group to which they belong.”11 Consequently, some people don’t take the comprehension of a written work as seriously as they do other artistic forms. “Lots of people are willing to admit that they don’t understand paintings or music, but very few indeed who have been to school and learned to read advertisements will admit that they don’t understand English,” continues Auden. Additional differences between literature and the other arts are more obvious: the medium (the novel vs. the canvas and musical score), materials (pencil and paper vs. oil paint and a musical instrument), and training, if any (self-taught, MFAs, workshops, graduate degrees in creative writing vs. private lessons with world-renown practitioners, attendance at a conservatory of music, matriculation at an academy of art). Distinctive about literature, too, is the convenience and ease of reading. Special courses, manuals, talent, or training are unnecessary, only a minimum level of literacy and a basic vocabulary of a few thousand words or less, fewer for children. No need to buy tickets, find transportation, or “dress up.” Reading can be done anywhere, anytime; special locations, such as concert halls, auditoriums, and museums, are not needed. For the blind, there is Braille and recordings. Books can be taken home, free, from conveniently located and ubiquitous public libraries; museum guides and audio tours are irrelevant. Novels fill bookcases at home while art is relatively rarely mounted onto walls (although racks of music CDs may compete with books for cabinet space). Literacy is high and story telling is universal. The number of readers of fiction may be declining, according to the 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading At Risk, but it is still higher than attendance at art museums, (classical) music concerts, and dance performances. What is more, readers often identify with fictional characters, naturally and spontaneously, an intimacy


rarely found in the other arts; museum-visitors and concertgoers seldom if ever “bond” with a painting or painter, piece of music or composer, dancer or choreographer. Psychology of the clinical sort has probably had more of an impact on authors’ writing and readers’ understanding (the nature of the mind, motivation, and behavior) than it has had on the other arts. Literature is also ubiquitous. Book discussion groups are on the rise and often involve entire cities. With English a required subject through high school and into college (as I imagine is the case for other languages in different parts of the world), students have many opportunities to read “good” literature and practice good (“creative”) writing. The other arts, at least in the United States, are usually electives selected from a pool of options (band, choir, art and music appreciation). Art and music are two of the first subjects eliminated from the curriculum during budget crises while school libraries stay open (although librarians may be let go). People “cuddle up” with a good book, not to a canvas (although they might huddle close to a CD player). A large commercial industry caters to beginning, amateur, and established writers. Books and magazines are published on how to write, along with workshops, conferences, and retreats with that goal in mind. Colleges offer undergraduate and graduate courses, programs, and degrees in creative writing, journalism, and related forms, such as autobiographical and memoir writing, and technical reporting. Not only can “anyone write” but also everyone seems to want to. 12 There are probably more writers, both professional and aspiring, than other kinds of artists (with the exception of photographers), and more untrained writers than “primitive” artists (“Grandma Moses”) and self-taught musicians (in jazz and folk music). Similarly, the number of readers outstrips other arts audiences (not movies, though). It is easier to find a piece of paper and pencil on which to write than a paintbrush, canvas, or tube of paint (or a piano). The conditions under which reading literature occurs are also distinctive, and these are often less favorable than in the other arts. Reading spans hours, usually days, often weeks, and takes much more time than looking at a painting, listening to music, or watching a dance concert. Consequently, reading is subject to numerous interruptions, distractions, and intrusions. Contrast these circumstances with musical and dance concerts. Audiences sit in dark auditoriums, their attention directed to and focused on the stage, and kept there by lighting, sets, and seating arrangements. Design and engineering promote optimum viewing and hearing; irrelevant sights and sounds are eliminated or minimized. Before the curtain goes up, a written program, with background summaries about the work and artists, including historical and biographical notes, prepares the audience on what to expect and think about. Announcements over the public address system instruct audiences to turn off cell phones, prohibit the use of flash bulbs and recording devices, and request coughers to use lozenges (unwrapped before

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the performance begins). The audience is prepped for a special occasion. Fatigue is minimized by intermissions, opportunities to discuss the performance as well as take care of physical necessities, including eating and drinking. Intermissions are interruptions, but brief, lasting only about 10 or 15 minutes, and taken into account by composers, choreographers, and artistic directors in staging a performance. The attention span of audiences, furthermore, is usually limited to two hours or so. Art museums similarly facilitate the viewing experience: passageways, partitions, signs, and guards control traffic; guides and audio tapes inform visitors; and descriptive panels on walls and display cases provide information. These benign, pleasant, relatively short, and generally positive circumstances facilitate the hearing of music, the viewing of paintings, the watching of dance, and the seeing of film. Attention, enjoyment, understanding, and recall are facilitated. The audiences’ reactions, furthermore, are shared with others, silently during the performance and vocally during intermissions. Compare these circumstances with the reading of literature, dispersed over time, interrupted by happenstance, open to the unexpected, and subject to constant disturbances. In addition, literature is read in all sorts of places, many not conducive to the reading experience. Novels are carried along on vacations, brought to the beach, read on public transportation, browsed through during breaks at work, and sleepily taken to bed at night. Reading, too, is private, a solitary affair, unlike those arts that take place in public and group settings. Questions readers might have about the uncertainties, incongruities, and contradictions intentionally built into literary prose by authors to arouse interest, sustain suspense, and encourage page-turning cannot be answered, at least immediately, when they arise. Clarification must wait until readers can look up reviews, find others who have read a work, attend a lecture, or take a class. Even when reading is public, as in book discussion groups, interpretations are “contaminated” by feedback from public forums, the press, radio, and the workplace.13 Discussed next are two key distinctions between literature and the other arts.

Literary content is psychological What is most distinctive about literature is that it is explicitly, directly, and concretely about psychological phenomena: thoughts, emotions, motives, and the like; in a word, experience. Paris put it this way: “Fiction is mainly concerned with the representation, the interpretations, and the aesthetic patterning of experience …. [Literature is] a marvelously rich portal of a particular kind of consciousness … to a variety of human situations [that] enlarge our knowledge of experience, [a] phenomenological grasp of experience in its immediacy and ambiguity.” 14 A veritable flood of psychologically themed literary work is created by gifted writers who tell


gripping stories about fascinating characters involved in interesting relationships and engaged in provocative actions in mesmerizing situations that are read by vast numbers of engaged readers — all heavy with psychological implications. Books with psychological content, moreover, are plentiful. Of the more than 150,000 new titles and editions published in the United States in 2002, to take a relatively recent year for which statistics were available at this writing, the single largest category, general adult fiction, accounted for more than 17,000 works.15 Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs with psychological themes also thrive as do books of the psychological “self-improvement” and “self-help” kind. Musical scores (without lyrics) hint at psychological qualities (emotions) and paintings capture them briefly. We speak of a “psychological novel” but rarely, if at all, of “psychological music” or “psychological paintings.” (An exception is the “psychological film.” Some artists, too, like Rembrandt, are referred to as “psychological painters.”) As Giorgi put it, literature deals “with uniquely human phenomena in a human sense and in a human way, articulating the phenomena of consciousness and behavior.” In the same vein, poets, for Shoben, evoke “the richness of human life [and] what is humanly felt, [its] warmth …poignancy, heartache … gayety, and the dignity of human life … It is the poet’s job …to describe events in such a way as to evoke a sense of participating in them, of experiencing rather than accounting for experience.” Perhaps for these reasons Sartre called literature a special kind of psychological communication.16 Comparable claims are rarely made for other art forms, although each has its own way of presenting psychological motifs. Peculiar to literature, too, at least from a clinical perspective, is its preoccupation with the pathological and irrational: obsessive-compulsive behavior, dysfunctional family relationships, multiple personalities, anxieties, sexual traumas, and other abnormalities and extremes of human behavior.17 Unique to literature as well, is the style known as stream of consciousness, where the mental life of characters is described as a “flow,” a concept of the mind discussed in 1890 by the psychologist William James in his Principles of Psychology. Writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Ezra Pound, Steinbeck, Wolfe, and Walt Whitman place less emphasis on plot and character than on the “inwardness” of people’s lives, the way they actually think (scattered, fragmented, disjointed). Thoughts occur simultaneously or in rapid juxtaposition, as they do in real life. More is made of atmosphere and tone than action; and indirection and elliptical references take precedence over realism. Some details are freely selected while others are ignored or slighted.18 The other arts have unique styles, too (abstract art, atonal music), but none like literature’s stream of consciousness. Distinct, too, is literature’s invitation to all sorts of psychological analysis, ranging from the commonsensical to the philosophical, and others, often implicit, derived wholly from the literary tradition. Reader-response theory, for example,

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champions the primacy of the reader’s experience; and “deconstructionists” make much of the relativity of readers’ interpretations. Both approaches, in contrast to theorists who give preeminence to the author or the text, focus on the psychology of the reader and his or her re-creation and transformation of the meaning of the literary text. The reader is therefore said to be “privileged.” 19 Similarly focused on the psychology of the reader (and reading), but from an emphatically empirical stance, are literary theorists who borrow concepts and methods from cognitive psychology to examine readers’ mental constructions in creating imaginary worlds. In making sense of what’s happening on the literary page, readers are also affected with respect to how and what they think about themselves, their experiences, and their interactions with people in actual situations. Paraphrasing Gerrig, literature transports readers to another world who return to the real world changed by their reading. Theoretical borrowings along the lines of cognitive psychology are rarely if ever applied to viewers of art, listeners to music, or arts audiences of any kind. The cognitive approach to the reader, while quite new (IGEL, the German abbreviations for the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature, was founded in 1987), has initiated a great deal of research, reinvigorated literary theory, and challenged, through experimental and a range of empirical-quantitative methods, traditional, scholarly, and non-scientific approaches to literature. Among mainstream literary scholars, though, it has aroused controversy for slighting the role of emotions (why is a story liked? why does it bring pleasure?), for neglecting the contribution of personality and individual differences in readers’ responses to literature, for ignoring behavioral consequences (how is understanding translated into action?), and for lumping together all sorts of prose with the literary kind. Cognition is also an amorphous term, with several theoretical variants, each with its own set of concepts, strengths, and difficulties. In addition, cognitive psychology falls within a group of interrelated disciplines that come under the larger label of cognitive science whose boundaries are constantly expanding, for example, into anthropology and linguistics.20 When most people reflect on the place of psychology in literature, though, they almost automatically think of the “Freudian” view, an association more evident in literature than the other arts. Authors themselves, more than other artists, refer extensively to psychoanalytic concepts, not only in their own work but when talking about themselves in interviews and autobiographies. In contrast, selfreports by painters and musicians are often about matters of technique and craft; and discussions by musicologists and art historians are frequently on relatively less personal matters, such as absolute pitch and color blindness (van Gogh is a prominent exception). Together with other psychodynamic positions (Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Phyllis Greenacre, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich,


Ernst Kris), and broadly clinical orientations (humanistic and ego psychology), psychodynamic explications dominate. For example, Kiell’s three-volume bibliography, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, and Literature, published in 1981, listed approximately 20,000 citations and these were overwhelmingly Freudian, Jungian, and clinical in orientation. A supplement, published less than 10 years after the second edition, added nearly 8,000 citations, again representing mainly the therapeutic perspective. Similarly, the largest sections in Natoli and Rusch’s comprehensive bibliography on literature and psychology are devoted to Freud and related perspectives (Jung, Horney, Reich, Adler, Laing), including several that are clinically orientated (Maslow, Fromm, Holland, Schafer). Non-therapeutic theorists (Piaget, Bruner, Werner) and academic approaches (statistical, structural, behavioral) receive considerably less space. The journal Literature and Psychology is devoted exclusively to Freudian treatments of literature. None of the other arts has received this extensive coverage from the clinical viewpoint.21 Perhaps because of its dominant status, the clinical-Freudian position is subject to severe criticism (Chapter 3), much of it directed to its cookbook treatment of literature. A psychoanalytic template is applied to every writer, literature is always symptomatic of infantile fantasies and defenses, and authors are invariably neurotic. Representative is Wijsen’s rejection of the notion of “the poet or writer [as] a victim of either illusion or hallucination [who] suffers from a mental dysfunction between neurosis and psychosis” [and other] “exaggerated claims … made by the literary scholars who dabbled in psychoanalysis and by the psychoanalysts who dabbled in literature.” Literature, he maintains, has to be rescued “from the quagmire of ludicrous analyses of fictitious figures and case studies of authors that have managed to obfuscate the works themselves.” Notwithstanding this sort of censure (and more), a number of literary scholars favor at least a modified psychodynamic viewpoint, such as ego psychology or the position represented by Erik H. Erikson, which assign more credit than orthodox Freudians do to the reader’s consciousness, the writer’s strengths, and a work’s healthy signs. Again, Wijsen is illustrative. Despite his serious objections, noted above, and support for a cognitive view of literature in which the writer creates images that encourage readers to respond with their own images, he nonetheless comes to a favorable conclusion about psychoanalysis and literature. To recognize its limitations, he argues, or at any rate its imperfections, does not deny its penetrating studies of literary works. He approvingly quotes the critic Crews: “Hamlet may not have an Oedipus complex but Hamlet [the play] does,” which is to say that psychoanalytic themes can exist in a literary work without making it a case history of a character, author, or reader. The literary critic Noland takes a similarly tolerant view and points out that “some kind of psychological criticism is an important and necessary approach to literary analysis,” although it doesn’t have to be solely psychoanalytical; it can be pluralistic.22

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The range of psychologically imbued literary theories, discussed above, whether one agrees with them or not, enlivens the field of literature. With psychology seen as so integral a part of literature, it is not surprising to find authors often thought of as “psychologists.” Self-conscious about their inner lives and those of others, they are judged to be keen observers and experts at introspective analyses. Astute perceivers, thoughtful thinkers, and careful reporters, authors are attentive to what others ignore, adept at selecting critical events, highlighting key moments, portraying interesting people, developing rich fictional characters, describing unusual situations, and arriving at illuminating insights. Painters, musicians, and other artists are similarly gifted but their psychological revelations are indirect, framed as they are in non-prose. The stories invented by authors are make-believe but nonetheless grapple with important psychological topics with universal appeal. Consequently, the psychological content of literature attracts, holds, and influences readers, arouses strong feelings, sustains intense curiosity, and leaves a lasting impression. Except for film, no other art is so directly and overtly psychological in its origins, content, and effects on audiences.

The neglect of the psychological content of literature The second major distinction of psychological studies of literature is that content, compared to the attention paid to authors and readers, has received a relatively low priority.23 In the psychology of music and paintings, attention is divided, more or less equally, to the work (musical composition, portrait), artist (musician, painter), and audience (listener, observer). Not so in the psychology of literature, where a great deal of consideration is given to the writer, a lesser but still substantial degree to the reader, and least of all to the literary work — except as it relates to the writer and reader. Psychologists may begin with the text but only as a springboard from which to study authors and readers. Consequently, the literary work rarely “speaks for itself,” as it were, but instead “speaks” for writers and their audience. To illustrate, imagine how the study of the metaphor might proceed. Investigators could focus on its use by novelists, or readers’ understanding of it in poetry, giving relatively short shrift to metaphors in the text itself. That is, one might study the kinds and types of metaphors in various kinds of literature (novels, poetry, and so on), the psychological information they contain (about imagery, emotions, and the like), the underlying processes at work (in personality, language, the brain, and so forth), whether the study of literary metaphors supplements or contradicts data from the laboratory, and then relate these findings to differences between poets’ writings or readers’ understanding of novels. In other words, researchers can begin with the work, favored here, the writer (the option for those preoccupied with authorial creativity), or the reader (preferred by cognitive psychologists).24


The status of the psychological content of literature is further diminished when literary examples serve mainly to illustrate concepts borrowed from psychology (the Oedipus complex of Hamlet, primary and secondary processes, “regression in the service of the ego”) or provide materials with which to test hypotheses originating in psychology (the unconscious, cognitive processes, creativity). Singular psychological “truths” embedded in a literary text are lost or slighted in the haste to apply imported preconceptions derived from in-house clinical and academic presumptions from psychology. There is a copious amount of psychological content in literature, as indicated by the many collections of literary extracts that illustrate topics ranging from aging and anxiety to the Yerkes–Dodson law (the correlation between task performance and optimal level of arousal). Despite its centrality, the literary text, qua text, is underrepresented in psychological studies of literature relative to the amount of interest in writers (creativity, personal development) and readers (effects of and responses to literature), an imbalance not found with paintings and music where the work, more often than not, is paramount. Beethoven’s 5th and Picasso’s Guernica matter; all else — the artists’ childhoods and relationships with others, audience reactions, the views of critics, historical circumstances — are “frosting on the cake,” as it were. Contemporary psychology’s relative lack of interest in the literary work was not so marked among early psychologists who studied such issues, for example, as the expression of motives in literature (like achievement) and influences on a work’s evaluation by the authors’ prestige (which could be arbitrarily assigned).25 This is not to argue that the author who created a work or the readers who react to it should be ignored. Both are obviously engaged in a transaction with literary content. The point is to give all three equal representation in psychological research. Musical compositions and paintings receive more attention than literary content because they lend themselves to the full gamut of scientific research.26 For example, psychoacoustics and the physiology of audition are pertinent to music; psychophysics and the biology of vision are relevant to paintings; and both paintings and music are linked to sensory, neurological, and perceptual underpinnings. In addition, chapters on perception in psychology textbooks nearly always include a section on how artists represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas in order to illustrate the so-called monocular cues for the spatial reception of real objects on the retina at the back of the eye. Similarly, art and music education are strongly related to the scientific findings on paintings and music, and in clinical circles, art and music therapies predominate over “bibliotherapy.” With literary content, though, psychophysical and biological analyses are far less frequently pursued.27 As a consequence, the scientific treatment of the content of literature has not been as well integrated into general psychology as much as have empirical studies of paintings and music. The imbalance is understandable.

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iterary texts contain a huge amount of psychological material and stimulate proL fuse psychological reactions, and do so almost immediately and simultaneously, making connections to authors and readers difficult to disentangle. How denote, extract, and relate literary content when it so richly relates to and provokes so many psychological outcomes? Can anything be done to put the empirical study of literary content on a par with painting and music (Part III)? This is not to suggest that a scientific approach to literary texts should be abandoned because the effort seems too difficult or its accomplishments appear minor. Numerous investigators have produced an impressive amount of research, as attested to by the many references to empirical work throughout these pages. That said, the full potential of a scientific psychology of literary content has not been fully realized despite its overt and bountiful allusions to a host of psychological topics. Still, literature’s ties to daily life, everyday situations, and ordinary people are tenuous and not obvious, and whatever revelations arise, they are neither “facts” nor “proofs.” After all, literature is make-believe, fiction, fantasy. Thus, scientific research on literature is judged to be uninteresting, trivial, or irrelevant. Can the psychological relevance of literary characters, their relationships, and their behavior be given life by arrays of numbers? Literary prose is animated, forceful, figurative, dramatic, expressive, elegant, evocative, contextualized within a story — and often opaque. Critics are quick to point out, too, that scientific investigations require many literary exemplars (dozens, hundreds, thousands), in order to “boil them down” statistically and reach generalizations. Further, readers respond idiosyncratically to unique literary works by one-of-a-kind authors. Literature therefore lends itself best, say opponents of an empirical approach, to impressionistic, anecdotal, narrative, philosophical, historical, and aesthetic viewpoints from literary criticism, literary theory, poetics, and areas grounded in the humanities. Only psychology of the clinical sort seems appropriate. By default, then, the scientific psychology of literature is left largely to the speculations of clinicians. While many of the objections noted above apply to any scientific study of the arts, literature seems to bear a heavier burden. The next chapter examines more closely the difficulties of a scientific psychological approach to literary content and suggests steps to improve the situation.

chapter 6

A scientific psychology of literary content Obstacles and steps towards a solution

A scientific psychology of literature that concentrates on the literary work faces numerous challenges in addition to those raised by the study of authors and readers and the arts in general (Chapter 5). To begin with, there are several major literary forms: the novel, short story, play, and poetry. In addition, each has its own set of genres and sub-genres. Novels, for instance, are literary, mainstream, commercial, and generic; the latter is further divided into westerns, romances, mysteries, science-fiction, fantasy, and most recently, “chick-lit” and graphic novels. Further, the “classics” of literature, the canon, change over time. Moreover, the heading “literature” is broad, encompassing essays, memoirs, journals, (auto)biographies, folkand fairy-tales, folklore, myths, fantasies, fables, legends, odes, and epics.1 Oratory (speeches, rhetoric) is also literature (when recorded). To this large list add children’s literature, oral literature (story telling), and lyrics (of ballads, folk music, and opera). Then there are the hybrid forms of literature, the Bible, which is both religious and literary; ancient Greek and Latin works, which are as much philosophy as literature; and the occasional travel book that is literary (Mark Twain’s Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World). Some works of fiction are geared to specialized audiences, too: teens, African–Americans, gays. Nonfiction occasionally crosses the line and becomes literature (Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the story of two killers, first reported in newspapers). Not only are the boundaries between literature and journalism occasionally blurred, but so too are distinctions between fiction and fact (in memoirs). Quotations, proverbs, epigrams, and clichés are taken from literary sources. And slogans, idioms, slang, greeting card verse, and graffiti could be considered quasi-literary. The work of hacks and amateurs is “literature,” too, as are self-published books from vanity presses. Literature is read live on stage and TV, listened to on radio and recordings, and translated into film (“Gone With the Wind”). In short, just as there are many psychologies of the arts (Chapter 2), one for each medium, there could be different psychologies for the various forms of literature. Adding to these complexities is a paradox: The psychological “truths” of a literary work are fictional. Characters in a novel, the situations they face, and the conflicts they resolve are not necessarily “real,” psychologically speaking — although they may seem to be to readers who are “carried away,” demand a sequel with

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a happier ending, reject the death of a character, and cry on the last page. A heroine’s psychological portrayal in a literary work seems easier to describe, understand, and explain than the much more complicated and “messier” psychology of ordinary women in everyday circumstances. Consider, too, that fictional psychological accounts are written to achieve literary effects, not as case studies. Psychological characteristics, relationships, and behaviors are carefully selected, edited, organized, polished, and rewritten. For purposes of “dramatic license,” psychological information is omitted, added, distorted, and exaggerated. Psychology is used, in other words, for literary purposes, not scientific ones. In this sense, literature is psychology of an unusual sort. Writers, moreover, do not claim to be psychologists or to be reporting psychological facts; and literary prose is not a straightforward or literal report. Writers are not so much interested in being true to the psychological facts as in “telling a story.” Literature therefore makes no claims for accuracy or validity, as representing psychology in real life, of explaining people’s behavior in everyday circumstances. Stories are inventions, protagonists are larger-than-life, villains are drawn in stark black-and-white terms, events are “large screen,” and endings are fanciful. A psychologically omniscient narrator may be dead wrong, according to textbook psychology but correct in a literary sense. The psychological content of literary works may seem appropriate, convincing, and compelling but that does not guarantee its correspondence with, confirmation by, or application to the findings of the psychological clinic or laboratory, or its match with reality. Psychologically gripping characterizations in a novel are not superior, in a factual sense, to the dry reports of professional psychologists. Idiosyncratic literary characters with personal, mental, and behavioral peculiarities do not necessarily describe living individuals. The content of literature can be psychologically satisfying, suggestive, illuminating, and insightful but still questionable, obscure, open to alternative interpretations, and subject to conflicting conclusions. The psychology in literature is fictional psychology. For good reason, readers are warned at the beginning of a novel, “Any similarity to real events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Disparities between the psychologically fanciful and factual apply to paintings and other forms of art as well, but the line between make-believe and reality is more tenuous in literature because a written work is concrete and detailed, spun out over time, and deeply involves its readers for a sustained period. Two additional and related major problems are the large and diverse amount of psychological content in literature and its triggering of a great number and variety of reactions in readers. Multiple, contradictory, and incompatible interpretations of literature are therefore likely, each understandable and defensible.2 Hence, differences in “taste,” comprehension, and evaluation. We therefore turn to experts for help but they, too, differ, often dramatically. What, then, is a liter-

Chapter 6. A scientific psychology of literary content

ary work about? If readers agree, it is often on a rather vague level (“I like it,” “It was a good read”). Deeper meanings, if they reach awareness, are neither easily nor clearly expressed, or confidently held. Consequently, the content of a literary text is difficult to capture through the usual means of interviews, open-ended questionnaires, and ratings. Even if readers’ interpretations are sufficiently similar, they may not correspond to an author’s intent, which is as difficult to unravel as a reader’s understanding, if not more so. The application of a scientific template to literary texts is challenging for other reasons: the extended time it takes to read, the privacy of reading, the interruptions. The empirical study of any of the arts is difficult (Chapter 4), but the problems seem more numerous with literary content. Perhaps this is why a scientific psychological approach to literary content is not favorably received, by and large, in literary circles (Chapter 4), or well known, and accounts for psychodynamic views holding center stage (Chapter 5) to the point where references to the “psychology of literature” implicitly mean clinical, Freudian, or “depth” psychology, or the psychoanalysis of literature. 3 A telling example is psychobiography (also known as psychohistory, the psychology of biography, and psychological biography). Few scholars seem to know of a scientific variant of psychobiography that sharply differs from the approach initiated by Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci. Scientific psychobiographies, it may surprise some, examine the written record for eminent historical and living artists, writers, and others and quantify their personality, character, motives, emotions, intelligence, creativity, and versatility.4 The empirical study of literary content therefore mistakenly receives the criticism and skepticism intended for its distant cousin, or is erroneously assigned to the province of Behaviorists, “rat-runners,” and “number-crunchers.” 5 The indifference or ignorance of many literary scholars to scientific efforts has brought a sharp rebuke from Martindale.6 His criticisms, which might be judged as unduly harsh, even exaggerated, nonetheless represent, in the starkest and therefore clearest terms, empirical psychology’s case against much of literary scholarship. Supporting the credibility of Martindale’s objections is his extensive research in literature and the other arts, as well as his studies of aesthetics and creativity. They are therefore worth quoting at length. “Psychologists have done thousands of studies of creativity and thousands of studies of how personality relates to textual content. These studies should be of great interest to scholars studying literature [but they] are completely unaware of these studies.” Literary scholars, he adds, omit the obvious. “A novel is usually about the thoughts of characters and their interactions. If one wants to analyze a novel, one should know something about thinking and social interactions rather than making up his psychology and sociology as he goes along …. Before trying to explain fictional social interactions, it would be prudent to know what has been learned about real social interactions.” Martindale

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c ontinues in a similarly aggressive manner. “Poetics — by which I mean the general theory of literature as opposed to literary criticism — is a subdiscipline of psychology [and can therefore] be reduced to psychology, or simply is psychology …. In order to study poetics or even be a literary critic, one should have a good basic knowledge of psychology and sociology … Few scholars in departments of literature have a good background in either scientific psychology or sociology.” For Martindale, most scholarly discussions of literature therefore have little value. Attacks of this sort have not been launched against scholarly approaches to the other arts.

The many-sided objections to a scientific psychology of literary content Doubts about an empirical approach to literary content have come from several sources. Humanists, for one, make the following argument. Literary content does not pretend to be psychology, just as authors are not psychologists or do psychological studies, and readers are not looking for psychological facts. Writers and psychologists have distinctly different purposes in observing, studying, and writing about people, and they do so in vastly dissimilar intellectual and personal ways. Literary content and scientific psychology are therefore largely incompatible. Also ridiculed is the sort of psychology that lumps together dozens or hundreds of literary works, in some cases thousands, written in a diversity of places and times from ancient Greece to the modern world, not to speak of authors of various genres of literature, from different nationalities, and representing both men and women as well as the young and middle-aged. This is not the stuff of data, scholars insist, and it makes little sense to funnel it all through the narrow channel of quantification. Particularly galling to critics is scientific psychology’s simplification of literary content. Take as an example a frequently used measuring device, the semantic differential, which rates words, phrases, and passages from a literary work, if not the entire work itself, on three basic psychological dimensions: evaluation (“goodbad”), activity (“active-passive”), and potency (“strong-weak”); each dimension is represented by a set of bipolar pairs (examples are noted in the parenthesis above). The results, critics protest, yield facile summaries that miss subtle nuances, the touches that make literature great. Content analysis is another frequently used method, critics contend, that distorts literary material for the sake of empirical niceties. In this procedure, several coders working independently and guided by a predetermined set of themes or categories, systematically and exhaustively sort a literary text. Alternatively, the extraction of literary content is done by one of several computer dictionaries (the General Inquirer, Harvard Third Psychosociological Dictionary, Regression Imagery Dictionary). Through computerized key


word searches, hundreds of volumes of literature can be translated into machinereadable form. These and other sophisticated psychophysical and metric indices like the Q-sort that fall under the heading of historiometric studies, and similar quantitative transformations of qualitative material, do not impress those who object to the scientific approach.7 They contend that literary prose converted into abstract frequency counts and assigned to isolated categories are several times removed from their original context, thereby losing or distorting whatever literary virtues they originally had. Data too far removed from their sources illustrate the axiom, “garbage in, garbage out.” Too much depends, critics assert, on whether the appropriate word(s) were included in the rating, sorting, or computer search, and whether the categories into which the materials were placed are complete, comprehensive, and representative. Crucial textual material mentioned just once or only a few times is ignored. Consequently, the essential core of a literary work, those rare and innovative passages that profoundly affect readers, the key sections that capture the heart of a story, the crucial paragraphs on which a plot turns, are overlooked because they are so few. No matter how advanced the tools, analyses, techniques, statistics, and methodology, and irrespective of how rigorously applied, in the final analysis, critics charge, a researcher’s interpretations depend on making subjective sense of neutral tabular counts. For most literary scholars, a section of literary text makes psychological sense in the context of the work as a whole, and depends on the particular author, the individual reader, and the time and circumstances in which it was written and read. Literary prose, critics contend, carries its own validity and this varies with and influences each reader differently. The psychological significance of a literary text stands by itself, not when grouped with other works. Generalizations churned out by elaborate mathematical procedures and exotic techniques, aided by sophisticated computer programs, fail to do justice to a particular work, let alone an individual author or specific reader; each literary work is special, one-of-a-kind. To add up the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in thousands of novels, argue opponents of agile summaries of large amounts of literature, besides the tediousness of the effort, is a vacuous and superficial effort (a “mish-mosh”). A scientific psychology of literary content, obsessed as it is with numbers, conclude critics of scientific cheerleaders, leads to skepticism if not disdain and antagonism towards so-called scientific facts, and ultimately, the disregard of empirical work.8 Literary critics, scholars, and humanists who look askance at a quantitative approach to literary texts are not alone. A fair number of scientists, too, would argue that literary content is too subjective to be investigated empirically and then translated into numbers. At most, examples taken from literature illustrate what is already known and established in the scientific laboratory; they “prettify” the

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facts. In any case, apt literary examples are not a form of validation. Psychological excursions into literary content, say scientific opponents of such efforts, may be personally interesting and entertaining but are not objective or reliable. Like nonscientific skeptics, no-nonsense scientists argue that literary material cannot be counted in the way ordinary data are. Despite its considerable appeal and intrinsic attractiveness, the literary imagination, as translated into fictional accounts, has nothing to add to rigorous scientific inquiries. Thus, tough-minded scientists, together with followers of the ”softer” disciplines, hold that investigations of literary content are best left to the case studies of clinical psychologists and the narrative discussions of scholars. Many ordinary readers of literature would agree. Lovers of literature appreciate a work for personal reasons and these vary for each person; their reading experience is neither facilitated nor enhanced by objective psychological studies of literary prose. A line or two from a literary work can have a powerful psychological effect on an individual and lead to thoughtful reflections, profound thoughts, searing insights, and revelatory jolts. But literature in the aggregate — as the sum of many works by different authors filtered through various readers — is lifeless. What matters psychologically, say ordinary readers in joining forces with scholarly and scientific detractors, is a specific work, a handful at most, never a shelf-full. Readers who wish to increase their understanding and appreciation of a literary work are better served by expository discussions, narrative essays, biographical information, and author interviews that amplify a particular work’s meanings, spell out its implications, point to illuminating examples, refer to authoritative interpretations, and provide historical background. These charges are deflected by scientific psychologists who declare, “Look at the record,” referring to the achievements of Martindale, Simonton, and other researchers cited in this book. They also point with pride to the groundbreaking work of Berlyne’s “new experimental aesthetics” and those who followed his lead in investigating the content, structure, and other characteristics of literary materials, such as word density, typicality, and other features of the text, and related them to judgments of complexity, novelty, surprisingness, incongruity, and other dimensions believed to be immune to empirical inquiry (“mystery”?).9 Criticisms by ignorant outsiders are therefore ignored, including scholarship that might improve scientists’ work. Take as an example the recent surge of empirical research on stories written by non-professional writers: the aged, powerless, and non-privileged.10 Investigators of these subjects, at least to date, have paid scant attention to the premier exemplars of story-telling — the literary works of acknowledged masters. Surely “coming of age” stories, and fictionalized accounts of momentous events that directed lives, not to speak of tales of love, friendship, and loss, along with the hard-won knowledge of literary scholars on such basic matters as plot


and character development, are applicable to the psychological study of everyday writings by ordinary people. The impasse between advocates of the scientific psychology of literature-as-content and their opponents, described above, reflects the larger gulf between science and the humanities, the so-called “two-cultures conflict” (Chapter 4). A start towards resolving this deadlock is possible within the more manageable confines of a reinvigorated scientific psychology of literary content, discussed next.

Towards a solution: overcoming the obstacles to a scientific psychology of literary content The relatively lowly status of an empirical psychology of literary content, compared to studies of the author and reader, and the bounty of objective studies of paintings and music, are due to several factors that range from the overwhelming psychological richness of literary content to the overriding intrusion of Freudian perspectives. But the primary impediment, in my view, is the difficulty in specifying a literary text with psychological import, the passage that has a cognitive, personal, and affective impact on readers and reflects a writer at his or her best.

The importance of the literary stimulus Literary content instigates a response in a reader that reflects the psychological acumen of the writer, but the text is the weakest of the three components of the psychology of literature (Chapter 5). What do writers put into a literary work and what do readers receive? The answer is uncertain when the literary stimulus, the nexus between author and reader, is undefined. This task is easier with other art forms. With paintings, the stimulus that initiates a viewer’s engagement is encompassed by a glance. So, too, with music, where an opening note or two, a chord, a bar at most, evokes an immediate reaction. In the case of literature, though, reading unfolds over time and involves many passages. It is therefore difficult to specify which word, phrase, or line initiated a psychological response. Which sections of Hamlet have a critical affect on readers? That’s difficult to say, at least with some precision. A literary piece works as a whole through a succession of overlapping parts that accumulate and interact over time with numerous, amorphous, simultaneous, and dispersed psychological consequences. Take another example from Shakespeare, the aged King Lear, whose age-related infirmities influenced his selfimage, children, and relationships with others. However, the pertinent passages related to these consequences are hard to isolate and specify, at least succinctly. Key psychological material is instead defined tautologically: It is what readers say

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it is. How do we know this? That’s what readers say. But readers point to different parts of the text, if they pick any. The literary stimulus is elusive. It may seem strange to refer to literary material as a stimulus. But consider again paintings and music whose analysis begins with a physical stimulus: light (electromagnetic energy) in the case of paintings and sound (vibrating molecules) in music. Physical agents are the fundamental starting points for their scientific psychological study. Literature, too, like any event, artistic or otherwise, begins with a stimulus. Whatever occurs subsequently — images, feelings, associations, and so on — starts with a percept, the initial perception. Thus, specifying the psychologically potent stimulus — the literary text in this case — is basic to scientific investigation. When the initiating literary stimulus is denoted, connections can be made to its psychological consequences in readers. For this reason, investigators attempt to partition larger literary works into small units in order to make them amenable to analysis. This is what experimental aesthetics does with consonants, for example, but it need not be so reductionistic. For example, Sears segmented the novels of Mark Twain into related “episodes” of 50 or 100 lines.11 Literature is admittedly a special and unusual kind of stimulus, but no more so than the stimuli that describe paintings and music, or even more complicated stimuli, such as people, places, things, events, situations, and environments. A literary stimulus is no more “unnatural” than nonsense words (“zug”), isolated vowels and consonants, strings of arbitrary words, meaningless lines of text, innocuous sentences, and neutral paragraphs that are the trademark of traditional laboratory studies of verbal material. A literary text, like simple laboratory stimuli and complex real-life events, is attended to, selected, understood, associated with memories, evokes feelings, and abstracted into concepts. But in the beginning there is perception. A passage is seen as “good.” Its shapes, spatial properties, and figural configurations “flow,” look right (or wrong), fitting (or unfitting). Synesthetic, physiognomic, and other expressive properties are provoked (Chapter 4). The stimuli of literature, admittedly, are not like the stimuli that initiate the experience of music, paintings, sculpture, and other works of art. They are relatively limited and brief, leading Pratt to conclude that “far more attention is given to those arts in which form predominates, than to those in which words are the fleeting clues to meaning and ideas.” 12 The visual and auditory character of paintings and music, given their brevity, makes them relatively easy to specify, measure, control, and manipulate. Film and dance unfold over time, too, like literature, but a critical scene or unique movement can be mentally or photographically frozen into a singular moment. Hence the power of still photographs. Literary stimuli are therefore at a disadvantage, methodologically speaking. In the experimental aesthetics of paintings and music, stimuli are purposely varied in order to determine what makes a work liked, satisfying, meaningful, pleasing,


and “good.” In contrast, the experimental aesthetics of literature is limited to verbal stimuli bereft of literary value, like vowels and consonants, occasionally lines, rarely paragraphs. Literary content, unlike paintings and music, resists being broken down into its constituent parts. Consequently, for Berlyne, studies of literature do not easily meet the “gold standard” of experimental research, which is the manipulation of stimuli. With the psychology of literature lacking scientific “seriousness,” Berlyne concludes, it is “not taken seriously.” 13 From a perceptual standpoint, the question of what makes literature “work” or “great” has to be translated into what sorts of literary stimuli make literature “work” or “great”? Similarly, the issue of why readers appreciate a literary work has to be framed as what sorts of literary stimuli lead them to appreciate a work? To know what readers of literature perceive helps us better understand the tension of an introductory paragraph, the power of a literary passage, the excitement of a single line, and the rightness of a phrase. A fine-grained definition of the literary stimulus makes it possible to tie a particular text to its psychological consequences in readers, and analyze what writers put into a work that makes it “literary” or creative. Thus, to know what a piece of literature is composed of, perceptually, is critical. When the literary stimulus can be pointed to as something “out there,” on a page, then a study can be objective and open to public scrutiny, and both quantitative measurements and experiments are possible. But when the literary stimulus can only be specified in the coarsest terms, the study of literary content is largely limited to “softer” qualitative research methods: interviews, questionnaires, surveys, and self-reports where readers’ reactions to literary materials and writers’ creative prose cannot be securely anchored. The amorphousness of the literary stimulus, however, is a boon to readers and scholars, for it encourages abundant and divergent interpretations. All are correct — or wrong. There is no way of knowing which. But the obscurity of an undefined literary passage impedes scientific study. Hence scientific studies of literature are outstripped by research on paintings and music, scientific psychology’s place in literature is diminished, an understanding of literary texts remains undeveloped, knowledge of readers and authors stays incomplete, and an enfeebled empirical psychology of literature attracts little interest from scholars, scientists, and general readers. Can this impoverished state of affairs be improved?

The virtues of brief literary materials Short literary forms make it easier to identify the literary passage that evokes an “ah-ha” experience in readers as well as pinpoints the writer’s creative imagination. Psychological content is also easier to extract and quantify. A brief work, in addition, takes relatively little time to read and evokes a quick reaction, thereby minimizing forgetting and interference from external events.14 Short forms have

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another advantage: Frequency counts of its subject matter and its organization into categories are not so far removed from the original text as to be unrecognizable. Thus, a content analysis and other measuring devices (the semantic differential, the Q-sort) are not so severely abstracted as to be completely unrelated to their sources. Relationships between the psychological content of literature to readers’ responses and authors’ intentions are thereby more apparent. The short story is an ideal literary form.15 By definition, it is brief, but not so much so that, like a poem, it is hard to understand and subject to multiple and ambiguous interpretations. A typical short story is 3000 words or less, and “shortshorts” and “flash fiction” are even shorter, with as few as 75 to 100 words. Significantly, the short story is a compact psychological narrative with a unitary and dominant mood or “voice” that is about a single (and prominent) event that occurs in a limited amount of time centered around a specific experience, encounter, or relationship. A short story revolves around a single, coherent, and unified theme about an exceptional human character, a shattering event, a powerful emotion. The short story therefore has an immediate as well as a circumscribed psychological impact. Unlike a novel or play, the short story distills the essential psychological qualities of a person, crisis, conflict, or relationship into a minimum amount of textual exposition, narration, description, character development, and dialogue. Nonetheless, like longer literary forms, the short story has a palpable psychological effect on readers: it arouses interest, creates tension, sustains expectations, poses a dilemma, yields surprises, and reaches a resolution (or at least suggests one — or more). But unlike lengthier forms that unfold and build up gradually over hundreds of pages and hours of reading, the short story arrives at its (psychological) point quickly. The textual brevity and psychological focus of the short story facilitates the detection and denotation of its key literary moment, its psychological center, its effective stimulus. While not as brief as a glance at a painting or the opening chords of a symphony, the short story approaches that ideal: it captures a bounded psychological moment. The psychological import of a particular passage, once revealed, can then be tied to readers’ understanding, feelings, pleasure, revelatory experience, and so on. A particular phrase, line, paragraph, or section can be specified as a psychological “turning point,” “effective,” “interesting,” “profound,” “on target,” “good,” and “liked.” Statistical snapshots become more meaningful, sensible, and justified when they are closely tied to a specific text. Despite these advantages, the short story has attracted relatively little empirical coverage. Tellingly, Kiell’s exhaustive bibliography on psychology and literature has no separate section on the short story while fiction, drama, poetry, folklore, folktales, fairy tales, and fables do, receiving separate and extensive treatment in sections that span 15 to 119 pages of citations.16 Ironically, Poe, the “father” of the


short story, is the subject of considerable psychological attention of the clinical sort — but much less than the work he fathered. Little psychological research has been directed to other brief literary forms as well, like essays and memoirs, a fate shared with even briefer materials with literary origins, such as quotations, proverbs, metaphors, slang, epigrams, jokes, witticisms, analogies, and puns. A few relatively brief literary forms, though, have done well. Plays by Shakespeare (and to a much lesser extent, Chekhov), British and French poems, and Greek odes have attracted empirical attention.17 In the chapters that follow, a variety of brief literary and quasi-literary forms are subject to empirical research on a range of topics in psychology.

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part 3

The psychological relevance of brief literary forms

chapter 7

Poetry, autobiographies, and titles Their contribution to cognition, creativity, and physiognomic perception

The psychological content of literature, I have argued, is more easily extracted from briefer works, like poetry, than longer forms, such as novels, because the relevant passage, the literary stimulus (Chapter 6), is more readily targeted. Advantageously, too, brief materials can be read quickly, thereby minimizing interruptions, reducing distractions, and decreasing forgetting. These virtues, and their bearing on the psychology of learning, creativity, and physiognomy (the expressiveness of perception), are demonstrated in this chapter through studies of poetry, autobiographical statements by artists, and titles of abstract art and short stories. Subsequent chapters investigate other brief literary materials and their contribution to additional psychological topics.

Poetry, the recognition of style, and concept learning Style is a complicated concept that depends on a number of psychological processes that space allows only brief mention here. To capture a work’s style means attending to multiple exemplars of an artist’s work, noting and remembering their distinctive features, and comparing and contrasting these with new examples by the same and other artists. Consider poetic style. Readers select relevant clues from a few lines, whose meanings may not be easily discerned or verbalized, and make decisions about similarities and differences with subsequent exemplars. Eventually, a concept about a particular kind of poet or poetry is formed, a process no different from the forming of a concept for any object, artistic or otherwise, such as a child’s concept of “daddy” which requires her to differentiate between various kinds of male figures. In the study that follows, the learning of poetic styles included the works of five modern poets: Cummings, Dickey, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Wright.1 Examples were chosen on the basis of the similarity of subjects, mood, length (about 18 lines), line structure, and punctuation. (The poetry by Cummings in this sample was not idiosyncratically punctuated.) The poems, their authors deleted, were read by two groups of undergraduates (totaling 27) and

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nearly equally divided by gender. The readers were similar in their (modest) liking for, knowledge about, and personal interest in poetry according to a questionnaire completed before the study began. The poetry was presented in three stages. First, five unidentified poems by the five authors, one example from each, were read and guesses made about authorship. Not surprisingly, few were correct. In the second part of the study, the readers were randomly divided into two groups. A “trained” or experimental group read five sets of four poems by each of the five poets, but now identified by name. An “untrained” or control group was given the names of the five poets only (without examples), and shown for about the same amount of time as the experimental group needed to read the identified poems. Both groups were informed that the identified poems (or names of poets alone, in the control group) had authored the unnamed poems read earlier, and additional examples by these poets would be shown later. In the third and critical phase of the study, five new unidentified poems, one for each of the five poets, were shown to the two groups who again guessed at their authors. The results should be heartening to English professors and teachers of writing: The trained group correctly identified more of the poems’ authors than the untrained group (Mean=2.61 vs. 0.71, respectively; the difference was statistically significant).2 Poetic style, despite its elusiveness, was successfully learned. Remarkably, too, only a few examples were needed. Importantly, simply exposing the readers to poems without specific instructions or detailed directions on what to look for or do was sufficient. The study, more generally, supports the notion that scientific investigations of literary materials need not be simplified, that complex prose can be empirically investigated, and that the aesthetic qualities of poetry don’t have to be stripped away in order to investigate them. Despite the rich and complex meanings, feelings, and ideas contained in poetry, it can be empirically managed. Haiku, an even briefer form composed of three lines with a limited number of syllables should lend itself even more easily to scientific study. Less complicated are the lyrics of popular music, similar in form to poetry but clearer in meaning. Poems and lyrics, though, are not the briefest of literary materials amenable to scientific investigation, as the next section demonstrates.

Artists on creativity Artists have a great deal to say about psychological matters such as creativity. The self-reports of 13 writers, 30 musicians, and 72 artists from the 18th to 20th centuries on this topic were taken from 115 biographies, autobiographies, and collections of interviews, reports, and essays. Culled from this biographical record were one-line statements on some aspects of creativity.3 The outcome, as might

Chapter 7. Poetry, autobiographies, and titles

be expected, was extremely diverse, with 501 statements on about 80 topics. To reduce this disparate and unwieldy number, 16 with at least 10 biographical statements were chosen. The smaller sample accounted for over half of the initial set of 501 statements: 255 or 51% (Median =13.20 for each topic on average). The largest number referred to the sources of creativity, that is, the raw materials from which creative ideas emerge (n=107). Of these, emotions were mentioned most often (34 times), followed by the stages of creativity (73); the latter alluded most frequently (27) to the initial conceptual stage. The next largest number of statements referred to the creative process (40), among which allusions to images predominated (17). Less frequent mention was made of the artists’ emotional reactions to their creative ideas, the aids that fostered creativity, the dependence on inspiration vs. hard work, and thoughts and feelings about creative efforts. The topics listed above accounted for nearly all of the material (220 of 255 statements, or 98%). Few artists referred to dreams (9 statements), sleep (6), reverie or trance (5), the unreal or fantasy (2), which may surprise adherents of a clinical-Freudian point of view. Similarly, suffering, toil, and anguish garnered a total of only 19 statements; and instinct, intuition, and passion were explicitly mentioned 5, 2, and 3 times, respectively. Overall, the artists had more to say about the conscious and rational aspects of creativity (64%) than its unconscious and irrational roots (36%). The artists, furthermore, expressed little concern about the effects of their creative work on audiences and readers, or the reactions of critics and colleagues The three groups of artists differed in how much they had to say. Painters had more (260 statements) than either musicians (122) or authors (119). These absolute differences, though, do not take into account the considerable differences between the number of painters, musicians, and writers in the sample (72, 30, and 13, respectively). When the results were recast into percentages, a much different picture emerged: Writers had relatively more to say about creativity than musicians and painters; and the latter two groups did not differ from one another.4 The absolute numbers are suggestive, though. Painters had more to say because their medium, a visual one, does not allow thoughts and feelings about creativity to be directly expressed. Instead, they communicated their thoughts on this topic in biographies and interviews. Hence, the large number of contributors. For writers, though, the opposite is true. Their work, albeit indirectly, reveals their thoughts about creativity. Thus writers had less to say about creativity in biographies and interviews because their work already reflected opinions on this subject. Hence, the small number of autobiographical contributors. However, these speculations about the difference between writers and painters do not explain the middle position held by musicians in both absolute and relative terms. Musicians, like painters, express themselves in non-verbal ways, and they might therefore be expected,

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like painters, to have a greater need to write down or verbalize their thoughts on creativity. But this was not the case, for reasons not apparent.5 Whether absolute numbers or percentages are examined, the three kinds of artists differed in how much they had to say about creativity. (The numbers were too small to distinguish the kinds of sub-topics favored by each group.) These outcomes have to be cautiously interpreted, though. The number of artists in the three groups, as already noted, was highly disparate and may therefore have skewed the results. Further, half of the statements about creativity were excluded from the final sample because they were too diverse to be grouped. Questionable, too, was the assignment of statements to topics by a single investigator (who also labeled them). Future research can remedy these possible errors by recruiting judges to group and categorize the items. Subsequent research might also compare the artists’ statements on creativity with those on other psychological matters, such as their views of art generally, critics, and the public, along with such impersonal topics as technique and craft. The inclusion of self-reports on a range of topics would put these self-reports on creativity into a broader context.

Titles of abstract paintings and short stories: Their expressive properties “Titles are beacons asking readers to come in and be welcome to our stories and poems. They give just enough light for identification and safety, not weak faulty signals nor blinding floodlights. A well-chosen title is a commitment to enlighten and entertain your reader-guest … A good title, like a porch light, illuminates the way home.” “Bad titles can be lead weights; clever ones can kill or poison … They hover, in storage, in memory as we read. It catapults us into a work.” 6

Titles and related forms (captions, headlines, headings) in newspapers, reports, ads, and announcements are important, as the quotations above illustrate, because they are the first piece of information readers see, read, and hear (or fail to). As initial impressions, titles hint at what is yet to unfold and thereby raise expectations. Will the work be serious, didactic, humorous, romantic, sarcastic, tonguein-cheek, historical — or obscure? Good titles “hook” readers because they arouse curiosity and interest (or disinterest). They also summarize. “In the title lies the whole point of the book; it wraps up the mood.” Understanding and memory are subsequently affected. Titles are especially important in art. Viewers of paintings often look first at captions (along with the artists’ names) and return to this information for clarification; a title gives, adds, and clarifies meaning. Unnamed paintings (“Untitled,” “Composition VI”) force viewers to examine a work without preconceived ideas


and form their own (implicit) title, which may or may not be good. Similarly provocative are anonymous titles in music (“Opus 31,” “Etude in E-flat”). Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14, Opus 27, 2 in C# minor is better known (and remembered) as the “Moonlight Sonata.” Titles, in literature like the covers on books, attract readers. Consider the original titles (in parenthesis) of D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (“John Thomas and Lady Jane”) or John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” (“Something That Happened”). The words “title” and “titillate,” it is worth noting, are close to one another in a dictionary.7 Titles serve as a guiding framework to organize a narrative, which is especially helpful when a plot or ending is dense, confusing, and cryptic. When titles are ambiguous or fragmentary, they invite people to read some more in order to find out what a story is about, but if too enigmatic they discourage further reading. Titles also serve as a shorthand summary, and a handle with which to remember a story long after its details have been forgotten. Writers, sensitive to the nuances of words, are careful to choose titles that support, clarify, complement, and supplement a story. Some writers may create a title first and then shape the work around it, others modify the title as they work, and still others come up with a title after a work is completed. Titles can be as creatively crafted as the works they caption. Despite the importance of the information conveyed by titles, and their impact on readers and viewers, texts on writing and composition make only passing note of them and then quickly move on to style, voice, characterization, grammar, and seemingly more important topics. Titles have also attracted little attention from scholars and researchers.8 The dearth of research and scholarship may, in part, reflect the difficulty of distinguishing between several levels of meaning on which titles simultaneously work. On the simplest and most direct level, titles have dictionary meanings. But they also evoke associations and memories as well as symbolic, personal, and idiosyncratic meanings known only to the author, highly informed readers, and experts. Falling somewhere between public and private meanings is a title’s expressive properties, of which physiognomy and synesthesia stand out (Chapter 5). These qualities, though, are muted if not submerged by the familiar words of a title and their associations. The two studies of abstract paintings and short stories that follow show how the subtle role of physiognomy and synesthesia can be uncovered by using irrelevant and meaningless titles.

The titles of abstract art At first glance, the titles of abstract art seem to have little if any obvious relevance or apparent relationship to their attached works, which themselves appear, on the face of it, bereft of any meaningful link to their labels (or anything else). Titles and their paintings appear to be arbitrarily and randomly paired, disconnected

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from one other. To the casual observer, the headings are haphazardly assigned to meaningless shapes, lines, and colors that happen to be adjacent. Hence the oft-heard opinion that abstract art is a capricious arrangement of blobs of pigment arbitrarily paired with tags by the toss of dice. There is another possibility. The letters and words that make up a title — their forms, lengths, spacings, implicit sounds—match the physiognomic feelings and synesthetic tone of the shapes, arrangements, and colors on the canvas; pairings make sense because their expressive properties overlap. Consequently, an apparently irrelevant title attached to a comparably nonsensical abstract work “fits” since both trigger corresponding physiognomic and synesthetic qualities. In selecting a title, abstract artists may unconsciously choose one that is physiognomically and synesthetically congruent with the work; both tap into the same feelings and sensory connotations. A Study. Viewers, when given a choice between several titles of an abstract painting, might match them arbitrarily since there are no obvious cues in the titles or on the canvas for preferring one over the other. But if a title and a work are expressively linked by their synesthetic and physiognomic correspondences, then the shape and implicit sounds of a particular title’s letters “go with” the colors and forms of a specific painting and not another. Phenomenologically, a title and a painting match because they are aesthetically “fitting,” inherently “belong” together, and tension is absent (there is “closure”). (I have purposefully chosen terms from the lexicon of Gestalt psychology because it lends itself to phenomenological descriptors.) Viewers who sense the compatibility of an abstract painting with a certain title therefore feel comfortable about joining them. These opposing possibilities were tested as follows. The titles of nine abstract works by Davis, DeKooning, and Pollock were shown to nearly 50 college undergraduates along with slides of their works. Four titles accompanied each slide: one was correct; another was randomly chosen from the same artist’s other works; and two were arbitrarily selected from the other two artists. For example, Davis’ Eye Level was shown with its correct title and with Ready To Wear, the title of another of his works, one from DeKooning (Street Corner Incident), and a fourth from Pollock (Moon Vibrations). An experimental group was instructed to select a title that “best suited a painting because it was felt to be pleasing, satisfying, and right.” Participants were encouraged to rely on their first impression and intuition, to feel free about being subjective, to not be concerned about accuracy, and to make an immediate and spontaneous choice. The intent of these instructions was to minimize readers’ deliberate search through memories, knowledge, and ideas, if any, about art and art history, and to encourage the free play of physiognomy and synesthesia. A slide of each painting was shown for one minute, followed 10 seconds later by four titles, a delay that ensured viewers had a good look at the work before expectations were aroused by


the subsequent appearance of the titles.9 A control group, as similar as possible to the experimental group in age, gender, and art background, was shown the same sets of titles — but without the paintings. They were instructed to choose the title “you like, find most interesting, and attractive.” Their choices would indicate the attractiveness of the titles, as such, which might influence the selections of the experimental group irrespective of the paintings with which they were shown. How did the two groups do? The titles chosen by the experimental group differed from those selected by the control group on eight of nine paintings. (Pollock’s “Pasiphae” was the exception.) The choices did not depend on the attractiveness of the titles, since the control group, which did not see the paintings, chose different ones. The experimental group, furthermore, agreed with each other’s choices on seven of the nine paintings. (Pollock’s “Pasiphae” was again the exception along with DeKooning’s “Ashville.”) Consensus was therefore the rule for title selection. However, only one match was “correct” (Pollock’s “Search”). Three of the consensual (but wrong) choices, nonetheless, were from the correct artist’s other paintings (two by Davis and one by Pollock) and three from an artist other than the one shown (all by Pollock). The preference for Pollock’s titles (DeKooning’s were rarely selected) suggests that this artist’s choices were richly evocative. In summary, ostensibly arbitrary titles and apparently unrelated abstract paintings were fairly successfully paired with each other, more than would be expected by chance alone. The matches, though, were consensual rather than correct. That is, viewers agreed in their choices although they were “wrong” in terms of the information in the catalogs from which the art was taken. But think about the meaning of “correct” and “wrong” in the context of abstract art. Artists may fail to give titles to their work (just as some do not sign their work), or merely place their signatures or initials on the side of the canvas last worked on). Consequently, gallery owners, agents, editors of catalogs, and curators may assign a title to a paintings, or perhaps modify the one submitted (as well as choose an orientation). If artists choose a title, they may do so on the basis of their feelings before, during, or after a painting was worked on. Whatever strategies artists and professionals in the business use to devise titles, viewers were not capricious in their choices. They agreed in their assignments of titles to nearly all of the works; certain titles were “right” even if “wrong” (according to the catalog). How might this have happened? As hypothesized earlier, the connections between titles and works reflected the viewers’ perception of common sensory (synesthetic) and affective (physiognomic) properties. One particular title’s match with a painting felt “right” and “better” than other possibilities. More research is needed, though, on exploring how viewers linked seemingly disparate titles and paintings, perhaps using post-experimental interviews. Another possibility

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is to record the time it took to connect a title with a painting. If it took place almost immediately, then perception most likely played a role; if the connection was delayed, then associations, memories, or thinking were at work. Future research might also probe artists’ reasons for assigning titles. Did their choices hinge on a feeling (physiognomy), a sensory quality (synesthesia), or something else (a personal association)? However the results are accounted for, they indicated that titles matter. Artists who simply number a work or leave it untitled are omitting a helpful piece of information and possibly frustrating viewers. The titles of abstract art are especially critical since they provide observers with a concrete verbal guide for visual material that is hopelessly clueless. For uninformed visitors to art museums, physiognomically and synesthetically endowed titles are especially helpful. The research suggests, more generally, that all sorts of titles, whether of art or any work, verbal or visual, especially when challenging, help organize a confusing flux of complex input. The same may be true of fiction.

The titles of short stories Titles of literature, like those of abstract art, help readers understand a work, especially when it is confusing, ambiguous, experimental, avant-garde, and innovative. Short stories, in particular, are often characterized by a paucity of information. Fragmentary, suggestive, and incomplete, they frequently begin ambiguously in the middle of some unknown place and at an uncertain time. As in the case of abstract art, physiognomically and synesthetically nuanced titles vaguely hint at what a story might be about. Usually, though, familiar and readily available associations mask the underlying physiognomic and synesthetic connotations of a title. However, these expressive properties are likely to emerge when a title is stripped of its obvious meanings. How might this be done? Untranslated titles of short stories from an unknown foreign language are stripped of their meaning. Consider the following Hungarian examples (English translations are in parenthesis): A Parancs (Fear); Etelek Lazadasa (The Rebellion of Foods) and Egy Pocsolya Emlekiratai (Memoirs of a Puddle). For American readers, most of whom it can be safely said are unfamiliar with Hungarian, the untranslated titles appear nonsensical. The Hungarian language, unrelated to English and its roots, has no familiar French, German, Spanish, or Italian cognates. Consequently, English readers of Hungarian titles of short stories have no basis for guessing their English equivalents. Similarly, Hungarian readers unfamiliar with English should not be able to correctly assign English titles to Hungarian titles. Nonetheless, as I argued for titles of abstract art, Hungarian and English titles are joined by parallel physiognomic and synesthetic ties.


These contrasting predictions were tested with American readers presented with 28 Hungarian short story titles (in Hungarian) from a 1979 collection of Hungarian short stories by Illès.10 In a multiple-choice task, the participants were shown four English translations of a Hungarian title of which only one was correct. (Incorrect titles were randomly selected from the same collection. Excluded were titles with obvious clues to their meaning, such as the names of characters and English words.) In another condition, 28 correctly and 28 incorrectly paired English and Hungarian titles (the latter randomly chosen) were rated by another group of American readers with respect to their “fittingness,” defined as the extent to which the titles “go with one another.” (A rating of “1” indicated that the pairs definitely “go together,” “5” that they definitely do not go together, and “3” indicated “unsure.”) The paired titles were shown under three circumstances: seen or heard, or both simultaneously. Seeing a title (as in reading) is a more familiar task than an auditory presentation. There should therefore be more correct choices in the visual condition than in either the auditory or the simultaneous (visual and auditory) presentations. The study was also conducted in Hungary. Hungarian readers, unfamiliar with English, were presented with the same materials and tasks as the Americans: a multiple-choice option where they selected one of several English titles for a Hungarian title; and fittingness ratings for paired English–Hungarian titles. Sixty l7- to 18-years old were recruited from Hungarian high schools where English instruction was not part of the school curriculum. Hence, knowledge of English was limited, in large part, to the memorized lyrics and names of American rock music and stars. The American participants were volunteers from college and noncollege populations and represented a wide age span (up to about 70 years old). Their number, depending on the testing condition, ranged from 22 to 45. Both the Americans and Hungarians were about equally divided by gender. The American and Hungarian participants were encouraged to make spontaneous choices and to guess, given the seemingly arbitrary nature of the task (translating an unknown language). The participants reported, when interviewed at the end of the study, that the tasks were fun, albeit hopeless, and completed with little confidence. Choices, they said, were based on arbitrary strategies, like counting the number of words in the English and Hungarian titles. The tasks were self-paced and took about 10 to 20 minutes to complete. Consider first the titles chosen by the American readers in the multiplechoice condition. Overall, the choices were more often correct than incorrect (Means = 17.39 and 9.20, respectively). Even among wrong selections, seven were consensual, that is, they were selected more often than the other three available titles. Only four titles failed to reach a consensus; the choices were random. Men and women did not differ in their selections here or in any of the other conditions.

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Turning next to the fittingness ratings of the pairs, correct matches were rated higher than incorrect ones, overall, across the three modes of presentation (read, heard, or both read and heard (Means=2.70 and 3.17, respectively; the lower the rating, the greater the fittingness). Mode of reception, however, had an effect: Reading led to higher fittingness ratings than hearing, or reading and hearing titles simultaneously. As predicted, participants benefited from a familiar mode of presentation. Hearing titles was evidently a source of interference, as was keeping up with a recording while also reading. Reading alone, though, allowed participants to examine the material at their own pace. Hungarian readers did even better than the Americans. In the multiple-choice condition, most (83%) chose one title over the other three on 20 of the 28 sets; of these, 17 were correct and three, while incorrect, were consensual. In rating the fittingness of the pairs of titles, 18 of the 28 correctly paired ones received higher fittingness ratings (Means=2.00 or less) than 26 of the incorrectly paired sets (Means => 4.00). For American and Hungarian readers, apparently meaningless short story titles in a foreign language nonetheless conveyed a sense of what they were about. Hungarian titles were more often than not correctly matched with their English equivalents, and received higher fittingness ratings when paired with correct rather than incorrect titles. Even when wrong titles were chosen, readers agreed with each other’s selections and fittingness ratings; a commonality of meaning was perceived even when incorrect. These results were quite robust: they held across several studies, applied to both multiple-choice and paired modes of presentations, occurred over three modes of reception (reading, hearing, and both), did not differentiate between men and women, and were consistent across two cultures (with stronger findings for Hungarian readers, whose knowledge of English may have been greater than presumed). The results affirm the role of physiognomy and synesthesia in perceiving the expressive qualities of prose. Embedded within the structure of literary titles, whether in Hungarian or English, resided an incipient feeling, a suggestive tone, a sensory echo. Readers faced with an unknown foreign language without familiar clues to fall back on, but unhindered by the literal meanings of familiar words, were receptive to physiognomic and synesthetic undertones. Words mean what they look like and look like what they mean. As Pope put it, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” The study could easily be extended to the titles of stories from other unfamiliar languages, including Chinese and Japanese ideograms. Similarly, the study of abstract art, reported earlier, could be expanded to include the titles of other kinds of modern art (op art, field art, Surrealism). Modern music is another candidate for research. The importance of titles for visual, auditory, and verbal presentations of any sort, artistic or not, and the underlying physiognomic and synesthetic messages they convey, encourage additional


research on a deceptively simple element of language. The two studies of titles, in abstract art and short stories, by demonstrating the importance of physiognomy and synesthesia in artistic contexts, imply that even ordinary prose is comprehended in ways that go beyond their literal meanings (as in florid and “busy” advertising texts). However, physiognomy and synesthesia in the arts are more salient and hence relatively easier to study than in non-artistic settings where their presence is blurred by other meanings. The two kinds of expressive language are examined in the next chapter, too, but with different literary forms, and the results contribute to additional topics in psychology.

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chapter 8

Literary names, indices, and clichés Their contribution to physiognomic perception, emotions, and thinking

The previous chapter demonstrated that brief literary forms — poetry, autobiographical statements by artists, and titles of short stories and abstract art — lend themselves to empirical research on the psychology of learning (the concept of style), creativity (as reported by artists), and the expressiveness of perception (physiognomy and synesthesia). This chapter covers research on three other kinds of brief literary materials that add to our psychological knowledge.

Names in literature: Their physiognomic properties Authors take the names of fictional characters from a variety of sources, including the Bible, history, and popular culture, modify them, and invent new ones to supplement physical, mental, and behavioral descriptions of fictional characters. What happens, though, when a literary character has an unfamiliar name with no associations? Do readers react neutrally, pending further information? Probably not. An unidentifiable name by itself, in subtle ways, may suggest a good or bad person with positive or negative traits to whom appropriate actions and dialogue will eventually be suitably attached. How does this happen? Literary names carry affective (physiognomic) and sensory (synesthetic) properties that are suggested in their sensory and perceptual architecture: their shapes, spaces, sizes, and sounds. Names, in other words, are like titles and labels in general (Chapter 7). To test this hypothesis, unknown names from unfamiliar adult and children’s literature were the subject of two investigations.

Studies of the positive and negative qualities of names Adult Literature. The fictional names of 132 men and women were randomly selected from an encyclopedia of plot summaries of the world’s literature.1 Familiar characters, such as those in Shakespeare’s plays, were excluded. Based on the stories’ summaries, two psychologists judged the characters’ behavior, motives,

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emotions, and goals as either positive or negative. Names of positive men were most common (37%). Nineteen non-English majors and college upperclassmen judged the names, listed in random order, as either positive or negative. (Few of the judges [1%] recognized the names, and their results were excluded from further analysis.) Overall, judgments of the characters’ names, as either positive or negative, were in accord with the psychologists’ earlier assessments in the context of the plots’ summaries. The accuracy of the judgments, furthermore, depended on the gender of the characters: Women’s names were more accurately judged than men’s. That is, positive female characters were more often correctly evaluated than positive males (62% and 38%, respectively), as were negative females (74% and 43%, respectively). Judgments for men’s names, whether positive or negative, did not differ from chance. Names of women correctly judged as positive were Timoclea, Jenny Denham, Marcia Gaylore, Alexandrinia Bergson, Katherine Plowden, Nicollette, Rebecca West, Fanny Le Grande, Andromache, and Mrs. Carrie Fisher. Negative women’s names were correctly assigned to Sempronia, Madame Grosgorge, Radigun, and Lady Brupton. The few male characters correctly judged were John Halifax and Philip Carey (both positive in the original stories) and Rector Kroll (a negative character). The gender of the judges also played a role. Substantial agreement was found among women judges for Dave Sechard and Douglass Roberts (positive characters) and Sir Epicure Mammon, Dousterswivel, Smerdyakov, Grantorte, and Malengin (negative characters). In contrast, men agreed on only two names (both positive): Stepan Trofimovitch Vershovensky and Jean Gaussin. Gender difference also distinguished the handful of names on which the judgments of men and women differed from one another: Andromache, Dr. Proudie, William Spley, and Mathias Bornea. Judgments of only a few names diverged sharply from their evaluations in the stories from which they were taken. Positive judgments were assigned to the negative characters John Beaver and Christopher Dillon, and negative judgments were assigned to the positive figures Neville Beauchamps, Geissler, Brack Baldrige, and Sarah McGregor. Finally, the nationalities of the stories were related to the judgments: 65% of the correctly judged names were American or English compared to only 40% of the other (combined) nationalities. The time periods in which the stories were written, though, had no influence on the judgments. Children’s Literature. Children’s stories are less sophisticated than adult fiction. Depictions of characters are less subtle, and strong emotions and clear-cut behaviors are the rule.2 Consequently, children’s names in fiction, compared to adult ones, should carry stronger connotations of good and bad, which is perhaps why authors chose them. They should therefore be easier to judge than adult names and hence more accurately assigned a positive or negative value. To test this possibility, names from children’s literature were taken from 90 books in several

Chapter 8. Literary names, indices, and clichés

collections of plot summaries of stories written for preschoolers through second grade. Two judges (psychologists) independently read the summaries and unanimously selected 25 names that were consistently described in either positive or negative terms. Unexpectedly, nearly all (23) were males and most (17) were negative. The six positively described characters were Jimmy, Jim, Robert, Bobby, Tom, and Teddy; the only two female names, Emily and Lucy, were both negative. Most children’s stories, at least from among those selected, were therefore about bad boys. (Male adult names also predominated in the previous study [68%], but the majority [54%] were positive.) The list of children’s names, randomly arranged, was presented to 25 undergraduate judges (not the same as those who appraised the adult names); none were English majors. As in the previous study, the judges were instructed to assign either a positive or negative value to the names. The judges’ gender again influenced evaluations of children’s names but more strongly than was the case for adult characters. (Since most of the children’s names were boys, it was not possible to examine the results in terms of the fictional characters’ gender.) Nearly three-quarters of the names judged by women (74%) matched their evaluations in the original stories, either positive or negative. In contrast, men made far fewer correct judgments (13%). Paradoxically, more women than men correctly judged the names in children’s books, most of which were about bad boys. To summarize the two studies, evaluations of adult and children’s names corresponded to their positive and negative characterizations in the stories from which they were taken. Gender played a pervasive role: female and positive adult names were more accurately judged, and women judges made more correct matches of children’s names than men. The results could not have been influenced by the popularity of the names or their associations to well-known and contemporary figures since the stories were unfamiliar, written long before the judges were born, and by authors representing a range of nationalities. The attributions most probably reflected, as initially hypothesized, the inherent synesthetic (sensory) and physiognomic (affective) connotations of the names’ structure. Ordinarily, these features would have been overridden by the names’ familiarity and their associations with known individuals. The role of gender in judging adult literary names, and for judges of children’s names, were unexpected outcomes and raise an unanticipated question about the gender of authors. Most of the stories in the first study of adult names were written by men while most of the children’s books in the second study were written by women. If this division of authorship is true in general, then the relationship between the gender of authors, readers, and characters in literature is an intriguing question that has not, as far as I know, been discussed in literary circles and would not have been apparent without the empirical data. The study, more

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generally, again attests to the amenability of brief literary materials to empirical research, and their elucidation of psychological phenomena, in this case the often overlooked and underrated presence of synesthesia and physiognomy. The advantages of brief forms were again illustrated in the next study.

Indices of literary content: Positive and negative emotions in literature Novels, short stories, plays and poetry are about countless psychological matters, most of which, fortunately for empirical purposes, are abstracted and summarized in synopses and indices of standard reference books in a word or two (Hamlet’s “indecisiveness”). Psychological content is also briefly alluded to in quotations, most of which come from literary sources (see Chapter 9). Quotations are especially valuable because they are numerous, cover a long period of time, and are extensively indexed and cross-listed.3 It is therefore possible to easily locate hundreds of psychological themes in thousands of several literary forms, tally and track them over time, and compare across nationalities. What are the psychological preoccupations of literature? Is it dominated by love or hate, joy or sadness? Such a survey, admittedly, is fraught with danger. Simple and abbreviated entries extracted from their original literary source are limited. Love is ostensibly a positive emotion, for instance, but a story could treat it negatively. The complexities of human nature, as depicted in indices of literary works, do not always fit neatly into “positive,” “negative,” or either-or categories. However, misinterpretations, distortions, fads, idiosyncrasies, and biases are minimized, as much as possible, by sampling multiple collections of different types of literature. A broad cross-section of the world’s literature, despite its limits, hints at general patterns in the psychological content of literature and these can be followed up by further study. Literary profiles, moreover, can be compared to psychology’s treatment (in its own indices) of love and hate, joy and sadness, and other themes. Psychology, it is fair to say, has typically emphasized negative and unpleasant emotions over positive and pleasant ones. More coverage is given to anxiety, fear, and aggressiveness than to hope, joy, and cooperativeness.4 Advocates of positive psychology deplore bleak views of human nature fixated on the abnormal and with limited human potential. Psychology’s pessimistic tilt was suggested by an informal survey of publications summarized in Psychological Abstracts, the discipline’s major citation source, between 1935 and 1965. More than three-quarters (78%) of the citations referred, broadly defined, to negative rather than positive phenomena, the irrational and unconscious, rather than the normal, rational, and conscious; to conditioning and rote learning and not understanding and insight; and to delusions and illusions and not ordinary and veridical perception. Similar-


ly, the oft-cited “heroes” of psychology are Freud and Jung, Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, and their associated schools of psychoanalysis and Behaviorism, and fewer references to Maslow, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Erikson, and other representatives of humanistic and ego psychology. Additional support for psychology’s pessimistic outlook is reflected in ordinary language. A search through a sample of over 2,000 lines of text in Roget’s Thesaurus covering 32 positive and negative emotions (16 each) found that the latter had more synonyms than the former (although not overwhelmingly so; 53% and 47%, respectively). This apparently doleful picture of human nature may be justified if in fact positive qualities are less important, pervasive, and interesting than negative ones, as well as harder to study, discuss, and write about. Nihilism, anarchy, confusion, and error may be closer to the normal human condition than their opposites. Is it the same for literature? Poems, plays, novels, short stories, and literary quotes, like psychology at large, may have more to say about fear and anxiety than love and serenity; and authors may write more about hostility and anger than cooperation and peacefulness. Emotions in literature may have initially been more positive than negative, or equally both, but became more negative over time as depth psychology and the role of the unconscious came to dominate intellectual and popular thought, and the cultural Zeitgeist. It is also possible that an emphasis on negative or positive emotions may depend on the form, more so for novels, say. than poems,. Further, American authors may treat emotions differently than their British counterparts. These and other possibilities were examined in the study of emotions in several literary sources, described next. The emotions in the world’s literature were extracted from 18 indices, abstracts, and other references to the content of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. Surveyed, too, were indices to several collections of quotations by writers, artists, and others with literary credentials (e.g. essayists, journalists). The median number of years covered by four of the sources, excluding quotations, was 123. (Quotations were omitted from this average because, unlike the other sources, they spanned thousands of year and their inclusion would have skewed the results.) The indices for the five literary sources were examined against a checklist of 120 positive/pleasant and negative/unpleasant emotions. The list of emotions was further organized into polar opposites, such as love-hate, and joy-despair, and these were further grouped into larger categories: positive-negative, favorable-unfavorable, pleasant-unpleasant.5 Positive emotions overwhelmingly dominated literary forms (73.4%). Of the 12 most frequently cited emotions, 10 were positive. Positive emotions were also favored for each of the five types of literary material, from a high of 84% in novels to a low of 64% in short stories, and ranging from 68% to 77% in the remaining three literary forms. In addition, positive emotions dominated every time period,

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which in the case of quotations spanned several thousand years and 40 years of short stories, the shortest duration. The smallest difference between positive and negative emotions was in short stories published between 1959–1963: 54% were positive. (Poetry was excluded from the analysis of trends over time since collections, not individual poems, were dated in the sources examined.) Among the 23 most frequently mentioned emotions across all forms, love ranked first (24%), accounting for 79% of all emotions. Ranking second and third, far behind love, were humor and fear (mentioned equally in only 4% of all sources). Quotations were examined in detail because they are more numerous than other literary forms and covered the longest period of time. Positive emotions again dominated, even more than they did in the other sources. Of 15 emotions mentioned at least 100 times, positive emotions consistently outranked negative ones, and in every century. For example, the frequencies for “love” were high at every time period while “fear” was consistently low; and references to “happiness” and “sorrow” favored the former by as much as eight percentage points, depending on the time period examined. Further, the positive member of the pairs of opposing emotions (e.g. love-hate, happy-sad, pride-shame) was favored in each case. Positive emotions also stood out when similar pairs of emotions were grouped into large categories (e.g. happiness-sadness, courage-fear), with one exception: quotations about friendliness-hostility favored the latter. Clearly, literature of all kinds gives more weight to positive than negative emotions, and has done so consistently for as long as words have been written. In the case of quotations this has been true for several thousand years (since ancient times). Literature’s positive treatment of emotions contrasts sharply with psychology, where unpleasant/negative emotions predominate over pleasant/positive ones, at least in the recent past. Literature and psychology deal with the same emotions but their emphasis is quite different: Short stories, plays, poems, novels, and quotes about love and other positive emotions are ascendant while in psychology fear, anxiety, and similarly negative emotions are central. The picture drawn above can be challenged on several grounds. As noted earlier, the frequencies with which positive and negative emotions are mentioned in the world’s literature offer a truncated view of emotions and their evaluation. Tallies of isolated emotional terms are not the same as their artful treatment in literary works. Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet about indecision, jealousy, hostility, loyalty, rage, trust — all of these — or more? Furthermore, equal frequencies do not necessarily mean equal importance; unequal frequencies are similarly ambiguous. In addition, a negative emotion in a story might have a positive consequence, just as a positive emotion might have the opposite affect. For example, fear may be the dominant theme in a novel but conquering it might result in jubilation and satisfaction — both positive — not to speak of freedom, independence, and autonomy,


all of which are also positive. Similarly, “love” on the face of it is a pleasant emotion but it could also be unpleasant, as in “unrequited love,” “the anguish of love,” and “destructive love.” “Grief,” to take another example, is patently unpleasant but could be cathartic and therefore positive. The diverse meanings of an emotion are not unequivocally flagged by indices to literary plots. Labels for emotions, in other words, are ambiguous. The essence of a literary work — what Hamlet is really about — may not be adequately distilled by a single category. The issue was partially met by consulting 18 different compilations on five different literary sources. The results did not therefore depend on one or a handful of sources, a limited range of literature, a smattering of examples, or the biases of any one compilation (or editor). The unique or special circumstances of certain years, decades, and centuries were countered by the large span of time examined. Similarly reassuring, works and authors from different nationalities were included, making it unlikely that one or another aspect of emotions was favored for cultural reasons. Importantly, the results were consistent across five literary forms. Keep in mind, too, that the indices, abstracts, and summaries were edited by literary authorities, scholarly experts, and knowledgeable specialists who read and judged the material, possibly in consultation with colleagues and other reference works. One problem not easily resolved was the sample’s elitist bias towards the world’s best, influential, lasting, and greatest works, the literature championed by scholars, taught in school, and collected by libraries. Excluded, therefore, were popular forms of literature: romance novels, westerns, pot-boilers, and the like. Perhaps the classics of literature are skewed towards positive emotions while mainstream literature, like psychology, highlights the misfortunes of everyday life. The distinction between the types and incidence of emotions in classical and popular literature awaits further study. A related objection is the favoring of Western literature. These and other criticisms are met by improving the study, as is true for any scientific endeavor. For example, professors of literature, book reviewers, and journalists could be polled on their choices, and the nominations reaching some measure of consensus could be annotated for content by writers and graduate students of English. Until this research is done, though, it seems fair to conclude that the present findings are a fair approximation of the relatively great emphasis literature places on positive over negative emotions, and moreover, that this differs from psychology’s predominantly negative stance. The question then arises: Is it psychology or literature that reflects the “true” state of affairs regarding human emotions? Are emotions generally negative, as psychology suggests, or positive, as literature indicates? The issue may not be one of either-or. Each discipline may highlight one side of human nature: psychology favors the darker side while the literary imagination highlights a brighter face. Alternatively, it may be that negative emotions drive humans to achieve

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positive outcomes. If psychology does indeed favor a “doom and gloom” view of human emotions, then this study suggests that negative emotions have been overemphasized in research and positive ones neglected. In this sense, literary references to emotions serve as a “control group” against which to judge psychology’s preoccupations which, according to this study, are suspiciously narrow and dubiously restricted. The questions might be addressed by examining the treatment of other kinds of psychological phenomena in literary and psychological sources. Is aging, like emotions, more positively than negatively viewed in literature than in psychology? Another perspective is obtained by surveying the treatment of emotions in non-Western literature (from India or China, say). Are there cultural differences in the dominance of certain emotions in foreign literatures? Progress on these matters awaits future research, some of which has been suggested. But had not the facts been obtained from a study of brief literary materials, these questions could not have been raised about the place of positive and negative emotions in literature, comparisons with psychology, and the larger implications of opposing characterization of human nature. Similar discoveries characterize the next study.

Clichés: Cognitive and personal factors in their use Clichés are another kind of brief extract from literary sources that offer one more opportunity to investigate psychological topics. While initially fresh, some borrowings, through overuse, become tired, trite, and hackneyed. Accordingly, handbooks on English, textbooks on writing, and manuals on rhetoric warn writers (and speakers) to avoid clichés lest they be considered lazy thinkers, poor communicators, or worse: uneducated, unintelligent, uninformed, and dull. In short, clichés are bad. But are they? Clichés were originally penned by eminent individuals, communicated original ideas, and arrived at profound observations in dramatic and illuminating language. Many refer to psychology: experience, behavior, social relations, and such. Over time, though, they too became worn out and empty, and writers (and speakers) were warned to stay away from such expressions lest they be judged psychologically naive. Nonetheless, clichés on psychological matters must have some validity for why else were they initially written and continue to be (mis)used? The question then arises, Are psychological clichés, like the rest of their ilk, meaningless, uninteresting, and useless? To determine the facts, three psychologists selected 292 examples from a dictionary of clichés that bore on motivation (32%), emotion (24%), cognition (27%), personality (7%), and miscellaneous psychological qualities (10%). (Examples are given later.)6 The psychological clichés, unidentified as such and arranged random-


ly in a booklet, were rated by 24 undergraduate women volunteers from two introductory psychology classes on four dimensions: (1) meaningfulness, (2) interest, (3) use, and (4) identification as clichés. (The four tasks were presented in random order except for identification [4], which was always shown last. Had it been presented earlier, it might have implicitly hinted at the nature of the list and affected the judges’ subsequent evaluations of meaningfulness and the rest.) More than three-quarters of the psychological clichés (77%) were correctly identified as clichés, 13% were not, and the ratings for the remainder fell within the “uncertain” or middle range. The 10 most frequently identified clichés are listed below: Accidents will happen A chip off the old block Rotten to the core To put on one’s thinking cap On the tip of one’s tongue Cool, calm and collected In one ear and out the other Man to man To let the cat out of the bag Birds of a feather flock together

The following 10 were not rated as clichés: Bloody but unbowed Disturbance of the mind To make a superhuman effort A study in depth Comparisons are odorous To set one’s house in order The personal factor The latest intelligence With a vengeance A personal attack

Most would be used (63%) and even more (77%) were rated as meaningful. Only about a third (36%), though, were considered interesting. The three sets of ratings were consistent with one another: cliché identification was positively correlated with use (rho = .58) and meaningfulness (.44) and negatively correlated with interestingness (−.58). Contrary to expert opinion, then, clichés with psychological content were overwhelmingly judged as useful and meaningful — even though recognized as clichés. As experts would have predicted, though, they were not interesting, perhaps because the raters were reacting to their dated, flowery, and exaggerated language. Lack of interest, though, was not related to their recognition as clichés

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or judgments of their usefulness and meaningfulness. Psychological clichés on motivation, emotion, and cognition did not reflect inadequate self-expression, sloppy thinking, or poor writing. Conceivably, they might have been perceived as efficient and quick ways to express complex and subtle psychological phenomena. Given the ambiguity and complexity of human nature, simplification is a virtue. In some situations, too, psychological clichés might be acceptable, as when speaking extemporaneously or if a writer intends to be ironic or humorous. The acceptance of clichés may therefore depend on context. Experts’ assertion, “Never use clichés,” no matter what the circumstances, may therefore be too rigid. To dismiss clichés out of hand, whenever and wherever they occur, and simply assert, “Avoid clichés!” could be a cliché itself. Had the judges been alerted to the kinds of materials they were rating, by explicitly labeling the study as “about clichés,” the ratings might have mirrored their reputed low esteem and thereby reflect experts’ predictions. Instead, the clichés were presented in isolation, unembedded in a text, and without reference to author, source, time period, or type of language. Without any framework, the judges might have seen the statements as just that — statements. A cliché, in other words, is not a cliché until it is contextualized in a passage that emphasizes its emptiness and shallowness. The absence of a context within which to place a cliché is perhaps why it is difficult to predict which statements will, over time, become hackneyed. Some oft-repeated statements, like proverbs and quotes from Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and the Bible, retain their freshness despite frequent use; they never metamorphosis into clichés. Stark warnings about clichés therefore have to be tempered. To the extent a particular expression, whatever it is called, fails to clarify, amplify, or illuminate a point, it is indeed a lazy and inappropriate use of language. Empty phrases, however labeled, should be avoided. However, there are times when their use is appropriate, as when we are in a hurry to make a point and there is no time to search for a better phrase. These arguments apply to one type of cliché (psychological) and a limited sample of judges (women undergraduates). Older men might judge non-psychological clichés differently. Future research should therefore include both men and women, and both psychological as well as non-psychological clichés (on the weather, for example). The broader implications of the results were partially addressed in the studies reported next, which dealt with the role of education and intelligence in the use of clichés. A background in English, for instance, should make judges sensitive to the exaggerations and distortions of language, compared to non-English majors; and students in psychology, attuned to the complexities of human nature and wary of psychological simplifications, should reject unsupported psychological generalizations compared to non-psychology majors. Students majoring in these subjects should therefore use fewer clichés. In addition, students with higher


grade point averages (GPAs), a rough indication of a certain kind of intelligence, should also be less likely to use clichés, compared to students with lower GPAs. Forty-eight randomly chosen undergraduate women, registered as English, psychology, and “other” majors, rated the extent to which they would use the 292 psychological clichés from the study reported earlier. (The meaningfulness and other two scales were not included.) Class standings, based on GPAs, fell in the high, middle, and low ranges. As predicted, English majors were less likely to use clichés (40%) than psychology majors (54%) followed by other majors (62%).7 Still, an appreciable number of English majors (40%) were not immune to the lure of clichés nor did sophistication in psychology prevent the majority of its majors (54%) from accepting them. Once again, clichés about human nature were surprisingly (to experts) acceptable. Intelligence had a mixed effect on cliché use. Students with the lowest GPA’s, as predicted, used more clichés (64%) than students in the high and middle ranks (56% and 52%, respectively). However, the difference between the middle and low ranks, although both were statistically different from those with the highest GPA, was small (and statistically insignificant). Even among students with the highest intelligence, the majority (56%) would use clichés. Thus, intelligence, at least in terms of GPAs, was weakly related to cliché use. What about the role of creativity? It seems reasonable for creative people to avoid clichés because of their unoriginality, familiarity, stereotypicality, and unimaginativeness, qualities that are the opposite of creativity. To test this possibility, 37 of the most highly rated clichés from the earlier study were rated on use by 113 undergraduates recruited from an introductory psychology class; most (75%) were again women. Prior to the ratings, participants completed several standard openended tests of creativity (e.g. listing unusual uses for ordinary objects).8 Students with high scores on creativity, it was predicted, should be less likely to use clichés compared to those with low creativity scores. Contrary to predictions, though, cliché use and creativity were not correlated (r = .03). The expected relationship failed to appear even among those in the top and bottom 20% of the creativity scores. A separate analysis of men and women also failed to find a link. The absence of a relationship most likely reflects a measurement problem. Cliché use was maximized in both the high and low creativity groups (Mean use =15.96 and 16.00, respectively), consistent with the earlier studies. In contrast, creativity scores for the high and low groups were widely disparate (Mean = 22.71 and 7.41, respectively). With so small a range of cliché-use, relationships to creativity could not emerge. Several studies therefore lead to the conclusion that clichés are more complicated and less odious than experts would lead us to believe, at least those with psychological content. The injunction, “Stay away from clichés!” and the sanctity of this rule, need to be modified, at least for ones with psychological content and when judged by undergraduates (and mainly women). Not all clichés should

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therefore be automatically dismissed or looked down upon as meaningless. Clichés are difficult to resist, and prohibitions against their use may be too severe as well as unrealistic. There are circumstances under which clichés are acceptable and justifiable, even by sensitive writers and discriminating speakers. Of course, it is also possible that rating a list of clichés may bear little if any relationship to their actual use in writing or speech. Of some interest, note that clichés were more often about motivation and emotion than personality and related phenomena, such as madness and the unconscious. Moreover, a relatively high number dealt with cognition, a blanket term for mental process associated with thinking, imagination, fantasy, attention, judgment, understanding, and the like. Psychology’s preoccupation with the bizarre and extreme, discussed earlier in this chapter in the study on positive and negative emotions, was not mirrored by psychological clichés from literary sources.

The lessons learned This chapter and the previous one investigated several kinds of brief literary materials: poetry, autobiographical statements by artists, titles of short stories and abstract art (Chapter 7); names of fictional characters in children’s and adult literature, indices of the content of five different kinds of literature, and clichés from literary sources (Chapter 8). The results were applicable to concept-learning (in the form of poetic style), creativity (as reported by three kinds of artists), the expressiveness of perception (as manifested by physiognomy and synesthesia), emotions (the kinds favored and whether positive or negative), and several aspects of cognition (in relation to cliché use). A number of questions were also raised for further study: the ease with which style can be recognized, the incidence of relatively ordinary aspects of creativity in artists’ self-reports, the contrasting priorities of positive and negative emotions in literature and psychology, the unjustified neglect of titles, the often unrecognized presence of physiognomy and synesthesia, gender differences between authors of adult and children’s literature, and the surprising usefulness of clichés. Other brief forms from literary sources, such as puns, metaphors, and proverbs could also be used in future research on psychological topics. The focus of the next and subsequent chapters, though, will be on quotations with a literary cachet. Quotations were introduced in this chapter in the study of emotions and many were probably clichés, and like the latter, they convey psychological information. Quotations may not be as memorable as clichés but they do not have their stigma. Other advantages are discussed in the next chapter, followed by reports of research on quotations that contribute to major areas of psychology.

chapter 9

Quotations Their psychological usefulness

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation. “Quotation,” Curiosities of Literature

Quotations and their close relatives — proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, and epigrams — express the observations and thoughts of historical and contemporary luminaries on a variety of psychological, social, behavioral, and other matters (moral, ethical, philosophical) and do so in succinct, profound, insightful, and literary ways.1 To wit: The genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs (Francis Bacon).

In a few words, often no more than a line or two, quotations distill, articulate, and capture a range of important issues that are typically written about at great length and detail, and in provocative, compelling, memorable, apt, and dramatic language. Quotations are therefore a powerful distillation of a large body of oral and written material that tersely conveys, in a form manageable for empirical research, impressive ideas and significant information. Conveniently gathered and indexed in numerous collections, most originated in literature (the Bible, Shakespeare, Mark Twain; see Chapter 10). Recognized writers, for example, authored the majority (57%) of quotations in a collection that listed the occupations of their authors, with the remainder representing a scattering of professions (artists, scholars, statesmen, politicians, orators, philosophers, historians, journalists, clergymen, lawyers, military men, and figures from business, entertainment, and sports). Other literary sources include biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, journals, and notebooks along with intellectual, historical, philosophical, and critical essays and articles. A large number, in addition, refer to psychological phenomena: experience, the mind, personality, emotions, behavior, interpersonal relations, person perception (Chapters 10–11), attitudes (see this chapter), and aging (Chapter 12–15). Take any emotion — love or hate, happiness or sadness, joy or despair — and dozens of quotations or more address it (Chapter 8). Recall the computer metaphor in Chapter 1, which hypothetically extracted the psychological content of the world’s literature. Quotations essentially do this. Quotations tersely focus on a single topic or theme, unlike other brief literary forms such as

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short stories and poems (Chapters 7 and 8). Consequently, the psychological content of quotations is easy to discern and specify, making them less trouble to explicate than other literary forms. Moreover, psychologically-themed quotations are organized, compiled in collections, and indexed according to their subject matter by experts. Quotations have methodological advantages, too. They can be read quickly, almost as fast as a painting can be scanned and the opening chords of a musical composition heard. Errors and distortions are thereby minimized in understanding and remembering, and interference from extraneous sources and distractions are reduced. Their large number makes it possible to select materials similar in length, comprehensibility, and familiarity. Presentation rates for one- or two-line quotations can also be easily controlled. Quotations on any subject, furthermore, are listed in multiple collections and extensively indexed by major headings and sub-headings with cross references to similar subjects. In addition, quotations can be sampled for different occupations, genders, and nationalities. They can, additionally, be tracked over time. As a bonus, quotations are interesting. Research participants enjoy reading, judging, rating, ranking, and sorting them; they are unlikely to become bored or fatigued. The accessibility of many quotations, expertly chosen, indexed, and interesting, as well as quickly grasped, make them ideal materials with which to pursue scientific inquiries on a number of psychological topics, any one of which is likely to have several hundred (or more) appropriate quotations. Importantly, quotations illustrate psychological themes that may complement, verify, and contradict research based on other kinds of materials, suggest new topics for study and discussion, and bring attention to neglected areas, such as attitudes to quantification (this chapter). They also direct our attention to gaps in our psychological knowledge and challenge established conclusions. The inclusion of quotations into the arsenal of empirical research materials adds a qualitative, humanistic, and interdisciplinary dimension to psychology. Quotations are therefore a scientific delight, at least potentially. The following two exercises contain quotations that bear on the subject of this chapter and the book as a whole: Quotations on quotations; and quotations on literature.

Quotations on quotations There are quotations on most any topic, including quotations. Are they, as I have argued, viewed favorably? Do people agree with them? In answering these questions, quotations on quotations were taken from the first 39 listed in two Internet databases under the keyword “quotations.” Of these, 29 were nearly equally divided in terms I judged to be positive (approving and accepting of quotations) or

Chapter 9. Quotations

negative (disapproving or rejecting). (The remaining 10 are discussed subsequently.) The following 13, in my judgment, take a favorable view: 1. I pick my favorite quotation and store them [sic] in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence (Robert Burns). 2. It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations (Winston Churchill), 3. Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody’s reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). 4. The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation (Isaac D’Israeli). 5. When we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony precluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize (Benjamin Disraeli). 6. Our best thoughts come from others (Ralph Waldo Emerson). 7. The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem (Ralph Waldo Emerson). 8. An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly (Edwin P. Whipple). 9. Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations (Orson Welles). 10. Apothegms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feelings (William R. Alger). 11. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it (Ralph Waldo Emerson). 12. I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation (George Bernard Shaw). 13. To be amused by what you read — that is the great spring of happy quotations (C. E. Montague).

The following 15, in my opinion, take a negative view of quotations: 1. Quotations from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara … are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport (Saul Alinsky). 2. When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living (James Baldwin). 3. Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction (Walter Benjamin). 4. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another (Ambrose Bierce). 5. That is the point of quotations. One can use another’s words to be insulting (Amanda Cross). 6. Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard (Robertson Davies), 7. Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs (Guy Debord). 8. Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote (Edward Young).

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Psyche and the Literary Muses 9. After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations (H. L. Mencken on Shakespeare). 10. A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought (Lord Peter Wimsey). 11. Ah, yes, I wrote the ‘’Purple Cow’’ — I’m sorry, now, I wrote it! But I can tell you, anyhow, I’ll kill you if you quote it (Frank Gelett Burgess). 12. I never have found the perfect quote. At best I have been able to find a string of quotations which merely circle the ineffable idea I seek to express (Caldwell O’Keefe). 13. People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first (David H. Comins). 14. Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely (Hesketh Pearson). 15. Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted (Hesketh Pearson).

The near equivalence between favorable and unfavorable quotations on quotations may surprise some readers. It did me, for I would have expected (hoped for?) a preponderance of positive quotations, given their importance in these chapters. Perhaps a different picture would emerge with a larger sample or a different database. (In this informal exercise, recall that I examined only the first 39 quotations from just two databases.)2 Some readers, furthermore, might disagree with my assignment of positive and negative values to the quotations. Standard scientific practice requires their evaluation by two or more judges in order to establish a reliable consensus of opinions. In this connection, consider the 11 quotations (below) that I could not categorize as clearly positive or negative, or which contained mixed views on the value of quotations. How would you evaluate them? Would your tally change the above results? 1. One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well (Amos Bronson Alcott). 2. Life itself is a quotation (Jorge Luis Borges). 3. A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion (Anonymous). 4. What’s the use of a good quotation if you can’t change it? (Doctor Who). 5. I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound — if I can remember any of the damn things (Dorothy Parker). 6. A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool (Joseph Roux). 7. What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before (Mark Twain). 8. I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself (Marlene Dietrich). 9. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times (Oliver Wendell Holmes). 10. I improve on misquotation (Cary Grant). 11. The American people would not want to know of any misquotations that Dan Quayle may or may not make (Dan Quayle).


Did these additions change the near equality between positive and negative quotations?

Quotations on literature Quotations about literature are also available. Do they reflect a favorable or unfavorable view? To address this question, two databases of 150 and 37 quotations on this subject were examined, and of these 30 were selected that, in my view, were evaluative. They are listed below in no particular order. Would you judge them as taking a positive or negative stance on quotations? (My judgments are noted in the endnote.3) 1. Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions (A. E. Housman). 2. If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble (JeanPaul Sartre). 3. Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation (Ralph Waldo Emerson). 4. In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest (Edward G. Bulwer- Lytton). 5. In science, address the few, in literature, the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgment on the few (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton). 6. It’s not a ladder we’re climbing, it’s literature we’re producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people (Nikki Giovanni). 7. Life comes before literature, as the material comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues (Phillips Brooks). 8. Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world (John Cheever). 9. Literature is the human activity that makes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty (Lionel Trilling). 10. Literature is the question minus the answer (Roland Barthes). 11. Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart (Salman Rushdie). 12. Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it (Roland Barthes). 13. Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience . . . from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation (Alexander Solzhenitsyn). 14. Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books (John Morley).

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15. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers (Salman Rushdie). 16. Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal (Françoise Sagan). 17. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature (Paul Valery). 18. Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey through the world (Chinua Achebe). 19. The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose (Margaret Atwood). 20. The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature (Annie Dillard). 21. The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films (Jean-Luc Godard). 22. The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine (Stephen Leacock). 23. All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It’s fiction’s business to ask them (Richard Hughes). 24. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low (Aldous Huxley) . 25. Literature is news that stays news (Ezra Pound). 26. The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms (Muriel Rukeyser). 27. A novel is a mirror carried along a main road (Stendhal). 28. Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures (Jessamyn West). 29. Let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books (John Morley). 30. Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill (Barbara Tuchman).

How did you judge quotations on literature? Did your evaluations take the prestige of the author into account, or weigh his or her occupation (e.g. writer or nonwriter)? Other questions for research with a larger sample are the following: Have attitudes to literature changed over time (modern vs. historical)? Does nationality matter (American vs. non-American)? What effect, if any, does the age or gender of the rater have on the judgments? As the two exercises indicate, quotations lend themselves to empirical study. Nonetheless, quotations have hardly been explored in psychological research, especially with respect to their psychological content, perhaps because they raise the hoary issue of oversimplifying and distorting. What does “positive” in the above exercises mean? “Accepting,” “approving,” or “agreeing”? Does “negative” equate


with “rejecting,” “disapproving,” or “disagreeing”? Either-or judgments overlook multiple, mixed, and contrary interpretations. Similar ambiguities would have arisen had numerical values on a 5-point rating scale been used, whereby critics would take exception to assigning every rating equal weight, and having an uncertain “3” equivalent to a definite “1” or “5.” Does a middle rating of “3” mean, “I don’t know” or “I feel equally positive and negative.” Bare ratings, say critics, miss, muddle, or misinterpret the meaning of quotations. So, too, do simple frequencies, another familiar objection. A single quote on a subject may “say it all” and hence no need to say anything more, while a large number, differing only in authorship or date, may add little that is different or new. There are therefore many good reasons to questions whether quotations can be treated empirically and quantitatively, and whether the results of such analyses would be of much value. These objections are not limited to quotations, of course, but apply equally to the scientific study of any kind of difficult materials, like art and literature, and are answered the same way (Chapter 3): Scientific criteria are ideals that can be only approximated, never perfectly met, and criticisms are met by taking earlier mistakes into account and designing new studies. Quotations are complicated, but this is no excuse for not subjecting them to research. Consider questions about sampling (which quotations on quotations or on literature?), the categories with which to judge them (positive, negative, uncertain), and the kinds of judgments (evaluative or non-evaluative). The answer is to find a consensus on the sample to be selected, the kinds of judgments to be made, and the labeling of categories. Many methodological quandaries, fortunately, have already been resolved with quotations. Judgments about their meanings and the categories to which they belong, were made by the editors of collections who, on the basis of presumably extensive experience and expert knowledge, assigned quotations to appropriate headings. The choices by a particular editor, furthermore, can be validated by examining collections compiled by other experts, another form of consensus. As another check, a list of synonyms can be referred to in selecting and grouping quotations (old age: aging, aged, old, old-timer, elder, senior, golden-ager, “geezer”). Quotations with multiple and ambiguous meanings can be resolved by consensus, given several, partial, or weighted scores, placed in categories that are broad enough to encompass a wide range of related quotations (creative: genius, original, talented, exceptional, gifted, bright, prodigy), or put in a catchall category (“mixed,” “other,” “miscellaneous,” “uncertain,” “unclear”). Finally, quotations that are too difficult to classify can be excluded (hopefully, not too many). The highly sophisticated scoring, coding, and reliability procedures of content analysis, to which the above methodological considerations apply, and which past research has repeatedly shown to be useful, can be successfully applied to written materials, including quotations.

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Despite the best efforts to reduce bias and minimize error, mistakes will be made, problems will remain intractable, and objections will arise. In the final analysis, one may have to weigh unavoidable shortcomings against tangible gains. It would be folly to abandon, solely for reasons of methodological thorniness, the rich psychological lore of quotations penned by perceptive and articulate individuals over the centuries. Whether quotations have a contribution to make is a question best resolved by empirical studies. If the results illuminate psychology, well and good. If not, improve the study rather than damn it. If subsequent studies contradict findings with traditional materials, or the results are unexpected in light of investigations with ordinary prose, then another study is in order, one with a better sample, improved design, and tighter controls. Better to continue research than wring one’s hands in dismay (or in the case of critics, with shouts of glee). Readers should therefore adopt a “show me” attitude to the two exercises on quotations in this chapter, the study on the pleasantness and unpleasantness of emotions that included quotations (Chapter 8), the studies yet to be presented in Part III on body perception and attitudes to aging, and the investigation of attitudes to numbers that follows.

A study of quotations: attitudes towards numbers Quantification is a key concept in this book as well as scientific research in the arts and elsewhere. However, the general public, as well as scholars and humanists, often take a skeptical if not disparaging view of quantification and related numerical concepts, like measurement and statistics. Perhaps this is why surveys and polls are regarded with skepticism, census-taking is resisted, bookkeeping at income-tax time is dreaded, researchers are maligned as “number-crunchers,” and information couched in terms of probability is tempered by the phrase, “it’s only statistics.” Facts are grudgingly accepted and scientific theories disparaged as “just theories.” A wary attitude towards numbers begins in school with dreary drills in “sums” (arithmetic), rote learning in geometry and algebra, and the avoidance of courses in statistics and calculus. Mathematics is one of the least favored subjects in the school curriculum and dedicated educators wrestle with imaginative ways to make it more palatable and attractive to students who already have negative attitudes towards tests, testing, and test scores, whose very mention triggers oppressive feelings ranging from nervousness to fear, and from resignation to dread. Nonetheless, numbers and similar concepts are critical to science, engineering, industry, business, and technology, to society in general, and for everyday practical matters like budgets, salaries, the stock market, and retirement. Yet negative feelings about numbers prevail, seemingly well entrenched and difficult to dis-


lodge. The public’s leery attitude about numbers is long standing and is historically associated with mysticism.4 Most broadly, fear of math reflects the contemporary conflict between science and the humanities.5 What do well-known figures have to say about numbers and related concepts? Some simultaneously take both a positive and negative view. Mark Twain, for example, asserted, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please” as well as “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.” Dickens in one instance wrote, “Now what I want is facts, facts alone are wanted in life,” and elsewhere insisted, “Facts and figures! Put ’em down.” Shakespeare, too, held contrary views. “Be sure of it; give me ocular proof ” while elsewhere he declared, “I am ill at reckoning.” More generally, how do the famous feel about numbers? To answer this question, attitudes towards numbers and associated concepts in quotations from different societies over an extended period of time were surveyed in the tables of contents and indices of an entire shelf of collections of quotations (14) in a university library. A checklist of 32 synonyms for numbers were taken from a recent edition of Roget’s thesaurus, including the following: figures, statistics, measurement, counting; certainty and uncertainty, probability, doubt; facts, proof, disproof; and knowledge. Of the 138 quotations initially found, most (49%) referred specifically to “numbers” while the remainder touched on related terms from the checklist. Three psychologists judged the quotations as either positive or negative. All but 19 (14%) received a unanimous judgment and these were excluded from further analysis. Consequently, the final sample contained 119 quotations. Illustrative of a favorable stand on numbers and related terms are the following (authors in parenthesis): 1. Figures never lie (19th-century English proverb). 2. Historians make man wise/poets, witty/the mathematics, subtle (Francis Bacon). 3. What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors? (Sydney Smith). 4. Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write (H. G. Wells).

The next set illustrates an unfavorable attitude to numbers and its cognates: 1. He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts — for support rather than illumination (Andrew Lang). 2. The age of chivalry is gone/That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded/and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever (Edmund Burke). 3. These are the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision (Lewis Carroll). 4. A few honest men are better than numbers (Oliver Cromwell).

The majority (65%) were judged as holding a negative view of numbers. Most, in addition, were recent, and the trend over time has been increasingly negative. Thus, over a third (39%) of the unfavorable quotations were written within the last

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100 Psyche and the Literary Muses

100 years while slightly more than a third (34%) were distributed over nearly 15 centuries, beginning with 800 B. C. and ending with the 17th century; a bit more than a quarter (27%) of the negative ones were penned in the 18th and 19th centuries. A negative attitude also typified the quotations whose dates were divided into six 50-year periods. All but one time period contained more negative than positive quotations by a factor of at least 2:1. The sharpest difference occurred between 1688–1737, which had about a 9:1 ratio in favor of negative quotations. A negative outlook dominated the first time period as well, “before 1587,” which had relatively few quotations. The only exception was the period 1588–1637, when the two kinds of evaluations were similar in number to one another.6 Literate and well-known writers therefore took a negative stance on numbers and similar concepts and this has been true for an extended period of time. Today’s low opinion of number-related concepts, anecdotally summarized in the introduction to the study, was confirmed by at least one literary form. The findings have to be tempered on several grounds, though. The professions that contributed to these tallies — writers, artists, intellectuals, critics, philosophers, and the literati in general — were mainly from the humanities, a group likely to be antithetical to quantification and skeptical about numeracy. The editor-scholars who collected the quotations were likely to hold the same attitudes. Consequently, the compilers of quotations could have failed (not necessarily consciously or purposely) to look for, note, and record more positive examples about numbers. Humanists do not work extensively with numbers, as scientists do, are not particularly sympathetic to their usage, and are less familiar or comfortable with their advantages. Concepts like probabilities and likelihoods, certainties and reliabilities, are not an integral part of most scholars’ vocabulary, at least not in a statistical context. Scholars also object to the ascendancy of science and technology in society. With professions from the humanities overrepresented as authors of quotations and editors of collections, quotations that favor quantification may have been omitted and hence underrepresented, thereby slighting the contribution of those who hold positive views of numbers (scientists, engineers, and technicians). However, there may not be too many experts in mathematically oriented professions who write about numbers for a broad audience, do so in memorable phrases, or edit collections. Scientists also came onto the historical scene later than writers, historians, and humanists and therefore have had less time to be represented in quotations. Thus, occupations most likely to hold favorable attitudes towards numbers have had little opportunity, at least until relatively recently, to generate positive quotations. Additional research can address the possible overrepresentation of negative views of numbers by obtaining a sample of recent quotations from previously underrepresented professions who are likely to favor numerical concepts (scientists). If published material is scant or hard to find, scientists, engineers, and

Chapter 9. Quotations 101

inventors could be solicited for examples through questionnaires and interviews. Alternatively, biographies could be searched for suitable passages. Contemporary scientific breakthroughs in genetics, physics, and biology may, in the future, drastically alter the negative profile of numbers. But even then they may not be collected, since positive quotations, like the scary headlines of newspapers that attract readers, have less bite or “newsworthiness” than negative views. The ambiguity of language also qualifies the results. Consider the Psalmist’s “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Does the word “number” in this quote literally mean, “Count the days,” or “Weigh their significance.” Both meanings are numerical (“count,” “weigh”) but have different implications. If “number” is meant to emphasize the importance of bringing more meaning to whatever days are left in our lives, the quotation is less quantitative than qualitative (it focuses on “value”). Additionally, the quote may not be unequivocally positive, suggesting perhaps despair, in that we insufficiently appreciate the passage of time and the limits on our mortality. Without more information about the context from which a quote is taken, its implications are incomplete or unclear. Even in its original setting the meaning may be debatable. A quotation that may appear positive on its face might, when seen in context, be judged as despondent, sarcastic, or offered with tongue in cheek. Ambiguous, too, is the absence of the term “numbers” or its cognates in a quotation. Even without any literal and direct references, a quotation may refer to numbers, but it is implied when read in the larger passage from which it was taken. Consequently, an unknown number of quotations might have been omitted from the analysis, just as others might have been erroneously labeled or misinterpreted. All things considered, though, the present findings were based on a large and fairly complete number of quotations that represented an extensive period of time, albeit not more recent periods (late-twentieth century and beyond). In the study’s favor, too, the quotations were drawn from many collections, thereby minimizing or offsetting the possible biases of different compilers and their collection strategies. An anti-numerical attitude on the part of editors was assumed but not shown. Even if biases were present, editors could have been aware of them and taken their partialities into account. Until shown otherwise, it is unfair to assume that the results were skewed in a negative direction. Of some reassurance, they were consistent with the public’s generally unenthusiastic response to numerical concepts, and were also congruent with oft-stated suspicions about science, the widespread ignorance of the scientific method, disdain for quantification, and society’s often shrill rejection of facts, data, theories, proofs, probabilities, and anything that smacks of quantification. As for objections regarding omissions and distortions, the study relied on three psychologists’ judgments of the relevance of quotations to numbers and their positive or negative evaluation. (Psychologists


have their own biases, of course, including a tendency for “psychologizing” and for “psychologisms.”) Recall, too, that 14% of the quotations initially selected were rejected because they failed to achieve consensus. Educators would be well advised to take the strong undercurrent of resistance to quantification into account when developing new scientific curricula, revising courses in arithmetic, mathematics, and statistics, and promoting empirical research on critical issues facing society. Scientists, too, should recognize public fears about the numbers they so proudly champion when announcing “breakthroughs” in scientific research, whether on psychological, medical, environmental, and other burning topics, and in writing for the popular press and in interviews. A negative attitude to numbers may explain why reasonable arguments based on quantitative research, not matter how pertinent to societal problems, are often ignored or greeted with disdain by society at large and politicians. The study raises some questions that scholars are in the best position to address. For example, why did the early 18th century evoke the sharpest negative reaction to quotations? Were there certain critical historical and economic events that influenced writers at that time? Did prominent individuals advance strong and convincing negative views of numbers? Scholars can elucidate the historical factors that might have led to a pervasive and persistent antipathy to numbers and help explain why it continues to do so. Here is an example of where empirical research can be joined with humanistic scholarship. In addition to the facts presented and questions raised, the study of quotations more generally indicated the strengths and weaknesses of a quantitative approach to literary materials as well as how these objections might be met. Several broader issues were again illustrated: the methodological advantage of short pieces; the psychologically relevant information in literary content; and ways to advance interdisciplinary exchanges between scientists and scholars. Quotations are pertinent to other psychological topics. Part III, which follows, examines their contribution to the perceptions of people (Chapters 10–11) and to attitudes on old age (Chapters 12–15). These chapters, like the previous ones, illustrate the relevance of literary content in short forms to different areas of psychology.

part 4

The psychological content of quotations Person perception and attitudes to aging

chapter 10

Person perception and the psychological attributes of the body

“A face can be read like a book.” “Suffering gives character to the face.” The “blush of love.” The face, it is commonly believed, reflects a person’s character, intelligence, sociability, desirability, and status as well as friendliness (hostility), interest (indifference), and sincerity (falseness). The eyes are especially evocative. “Mournful eyes speak.” “The eyes are windows to the soul.” Similarly, the thrust of the neck, the stiffness of the shoulders, and the tenseness of posture communicate a range of emotions, moods, and attitudes along with their intensity. Frowns, smiles, shrugs, grimaces, and eyes rolled up, down, or sideways can be more informative than what is actually said. Political candidates, celebrities, and other public figures are highly conscious of their body language during debates, interviews, “photoops,” and publicity shots, which is why they try to hide or control gestures. Bodily cues are particularly useful when evaluating a stranger or finding ourselves in situations that are unclear (dim light) or marginal (a fleeting movement), see a striking feature (a high forehead, a wayward eye, a sagging lip), and when a snap judgment is needed. “Is that a mugger behind me?” That people persist in and insist on making psychological sense of bodily cues suggests that they contain at least a kernel of truth; such judgments are not invariably wrong or unjustified in every instance. Body language, rightly or wrongly, informs us about others and them about us. Physical cues from the body arouse expectations, supplement (and contradict) what is said and done, and fill in details that are missing, insufficient, and confusing. Bodily signals also provide a context for fragmentary or incomplete exchanges between people. They are also evaluative, evoking either a positive or negative reaction, or a non-evaluative one, simply providing information without requiring any action. The psychological messages of the body, and the extent to which people use them, the consistency with which they are communicated and understood, their accuracy, and their basis in forming stereotypes, have been discussed since at least Aristotle’s Physiognomica. Interest in the psychological meanings of the face reached a popular frenzy with the publication of a book on physiognomy by the Swiss theologian and mystic, Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), which went through numerous editions. Even a seemingly minor feature, the chin, was thought to be psychologically significant.

106 Psyche and the Literary Muses A projecting chin is positive, retracting chin is negative … and indicates the presence or absence of strength. The angular chin [is not found] in discreet, well-disposed firm men. A flatness of chin is found among cold and dry men; smallness with fear … coolness of heart, and capacity for framing plans.

The eyebrows, too, were significant: “Wild eyebrows are never found with a mild, ductile, pliable character.” The brow, too, carries psychological implications. The wide and lofty brow was universally considered beautiful, the low and receding brow, ugly …. Those with large brows are cowardly and timid [while those] with small foreheads are very ignorant …. A brow developed in length indicates good sense …. The square forehead is a magnanimous man … rounded foreheads are passionate, rounded and lofty foreheads are stupid.1

The importance of outward physical characteristics in revealing (or hiding) inner psychological states is also suggested by the masks worn by actors in ancient Greek plays to portray emotions. In Medieval times, the seven deadly sins were believed to be reflected on people’s faces; and the “humours” of the body were transformed into choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, saturnine, mercurial, and sanguine personalities. Bumps on the skull, in the phrenology of Gall (1758 –1828), were thought to be external manifestations of psychological abilities. Closer to our times, bodily features, for Kretschmer (1888–1964), were linked to personality, psychopathology, and criminality. Body type or physique, according to Sheldon (1898–1977), was connected to temperament: The heavy endomorph had a visceratonic nature (the proverbial jolly fat man; slow, relaxed, sociable and forgiving); the athletic mesomorph was somatatonic (extraverted, dominant, enterprising); and the thin ectomorph was cerebrotonic (intellectual, fragile, underdeveloped, awkward, tense).2 The centerpiece of the body language thesis, with close ties to evolutionary theory, is Darwin’s classic work on emotions, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. The fox is a sly and cunning creature — and so are people who appear fox like (clever, shrewd). The meanings of outward appearances occurred immediately, involuntarily, and ubiquitously across cultures. Physical appearance, whether centered on the face, feathers, fur, or antlers, advertises “good genes,” the suitability of a mate. “ … 1000s of research articles … demonstrate that we judge people by their appearance and to prefer those who are beautiful.” 3 Beauty is not more than skin deep. Variations in physical appearance grab our attention, encourage closer scrutiny, and lead to friendly or hostile behavior, escape, or indifference. External bodily stimuli are perceived as good or bad, safe or unsafe, attractive-repulsive, inviting-discouraging, arousing-calming, and dangerous-safe. Additional theoretical support for the language of the body came from the Gestalt psychologists, like Köhler (1887–1967), who made much of expressive or physiognomic perception, which they called “tertiary” to distinguish it from sensory reception (primary) and its organization into unitary forms

Chapter 10. Person perception and the psychological a ttributes of the body 107

(secondary). The significance of physical features, it goes without saying, is affected by learning, social conventions, stereotypes, and cultural norms. People choose to have cosmetic surgery (eyelids, nose), liposuction, and breast enhancement; we select clothing, hair styles, and eyeglass frames for what they add to our appearance. Facial expressions can also be inhibited or exaggerated. 4 Society’s ideals of beauty, femininity, and masculinity, and the desire to manipulate physical features, change over time as fashions shift. Some cultures prize scarification, teeth filing, and head and neck distortions to enhance attractiveness. Evolutionists and Gestaltists would argue, however, that these artificial enhancements of the body are built upon and secondary to biological determinants. Whatever its theoretical basis, innate or learned, a widely accepted truism is that external physical characteristics reveal internal psychological traits. Science, though, discredits superficial, exaggerated, and dogmatic versions of the bodypsychology thesis, replacing it with more sophisticated concepts. For example, hormones take the place of humours, and localization of brain function replaced Gall’s phrenology. The term physiognomy has been translated into more neutral terms: non-verbal behavior, interpersonal communication, body language, the psychology of gesture, proxemics (the meaning of the spatial relationships between people), kinesics (the significance of movements between people), and vocalizations (utterances; voices “insist” and scorn). Physical-psychological connections, however labeled, contribute to interpersonal perception, person perception, social perception, self-image, personal attractiveness, and gender differences. Underlying these diverse terms is the belief in a link between the physical body and psychological characteristics. Changes in the concept of physiognomy, aside from its label, have also occurred. The focus on the face, while still dominant, has been broadened to include additional parts of the body, including general appearance.5 The perception of emotion is still emphasized but also that of personality, intelligence, and sociability. In addition, physiognomic qualities are extended to objects, places, and events. A landscape is peaceful, clouds are threatening, a room is inviting, rivers are wild (or tranquil), and crowds swell. “Still waters run deep” describes a strong and silent person (both people and rivers are “deep”). Artists refer to the inherently affective connotations of shapes, colors, sounds, and movements. In abstract expressionism, for example, physiognomy describes the effects of “pure” (meaningless) forms, lines, strips of horizontal and vertical bars, swirls, “blobs,” color swatches, color fields, and drips of the sort that characterize the canvases of contemporary artists like Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollock. For representative artists, like Rembrandt, the portrayal of the face, hands, and posture communicates inner psychological qualities. Physiognomically evocative, too, are the leaps of dancers and the massed forms of architecture. In sculpture,


marble, bronze, and wood objects “insist” on being touched, an impulse so strong it is discouraged by signs posted nearby and by warnings from guards. Actors are often cast according to their physiognomic “type,” depending on the planes and lines of their face, jaw structure, and even the swagger of their walk or casualness of stance. Aside from the actual words actors speak, the lilt of their voices, the tilt of their arm, and other bodily gestures add subtle meanings. Actors also react to the rustles, coughs, whispers, and stirrings of audiences as signs of restlessness or appreciation. In music, conductors use their hands not only to mark the beat, but by the vigor and pattern of their movements convey the dynamics of a piece to appropriate sections of the orchestra. The musicians, in turn, sway, stiffen, and shift positions to augment their playing and reflect their feelings about a piece In literature, the physical descriptions of characters, so-called “literary portraits,” carry physiognomic implications that enhance actions, deepen dialogue, and enrich the story line. The treacherous Cassius in Shakespeare’s tragic-history play Julius Caesar has a “lean and hungry look.” Hinting at his eventual betrayal of Caesar, the face, especially the eyes, are described in furtive, sneaky, and untrustworthy terms. In Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the adored and idealized Dulcinea is described as follows: “Her hair is gold, her forehead the Elysian fields, her brow the arcs of heaven, here eye the sun, her cheeks roses, her lips coral …” 6 How might readers react to a character with “a thin mouth, small temple, high forehead, prominent chin, red hair”? What happens with the addition of “a dark countenance”? “Squared shoulders”? In summary, the linkage between the physical body and its psychological meanings are deeply embedded in history, popular thought, and art. These connections, labeled physiognomic but with many other names (non-verbal communication, gestural language), are directly, immediately, and involuntarily grasped. They are seen as inherent in the person rather than built up through reasoning, learning, memory, or associations. Hence the evolutionary and perceptual accounts of bodily-psychological referents, although some are learned, manipulated, arbitrary, lucky guesses, or agreed upon by convention. Whether learned or not, bodily‑psychological connotations are sometimes wrong, partially correct, or questionable. Some of the controversy is defused by making these important distinctions: (1) What is perceived about the body (“flashing eyes”)? (2) What do we make of this (flirting, annoyed)? Here is where physiognomic perception occurs. (3) Are the connections valid (do the eyes actually indicate impatience)?7 Here is where errors are most likely. However the issue is eventually resolved, people look for physiognomic cues, take them seriously, and feel confident about using them. Despite the pervasiveness of physiognomic perception, or to state the case more neutrally, the tendency to attribute psychological qualities to physical information

Chapter 10. Person perception and the psychological a ttributes of the body 109

about the body, the phenomenon is often questioned, at least in psychology, and has not received much empirical attention. “Physiognomy is an important aspect of … perception. Yet … scientific knowledge … lags behind naive belief and credulous practice.” 8 In part, difficulties arise because the phenomenon has been investigated in a variety of ways. The face, eyes, and other parts of the body are presented in drawings, photographs, videotapes, and films, with actors or ordinary people, and in settings that are natural or simulated in a laboratory. Literary treatments have not been systematically investigated. Quotations are particularly suitable research materials (Chapter 9). There are often voices and words in a silent look (Ovid). Your face …is as a book, where men may read strange matters (Shakespeare). A suppressed resolved will betray itself in the eyes (George Eliot).

Memorable, felicitous, and elegant quotations by writers from different cultures and times offer insightful observations by astute witnesses of bodily-psychological connections, quite unlike laboratory materials with their controlled, posed, simulated, and unnatural qualities and modes of presentation. Quotations also have the advantage of highlighting the most salient physical aspects of the body, thereby reducing the potentially large number of possible candidates that might conceivably play a role in person perception. The eyes, for example, can be described by shape, color, folds, and lashes; they also squint, gaze, and move in different directions for varying amounts of time. Similarly abundant are descriptions of hair, which is found on the face, head, chest, and arms; and beards and sideburns come in various styles while baldness takes many patterns. The nose, too, has various sizes and shapes; nostrils flare; and people “look down their noses.” Foreheads are low and high, wide and narrow, and are wrinkled. Then there is skin color … Teeth … Quotations, though, are about only a relatively few critical bodily features. Likewise, quotations focus on the most prominent of the many possible psychological connotations of the body. With relatively few mental, affective, and behavioral characteristics represented, the large number of potential possibilities is greatly reduced. Quotations are therefore a unique literary catalog of the relationships between specific parts of the body and their ties to particular psychological consequences. The chapter that follows addresses the following questions: (1) What parts of the body evoke psychological meanings? Is it the face in general or the eyes in particular? Which of the two — the face or eyes — communicates a greater amount of psychological information? And of what sort? Does the face convey more about emotions (or thoughts) than the eyes — or the reverse? Does general appearance trump both? What, and how much, if anything, do the chin and brow contribute? The research question shifts from the physical to the psychological.


(2) What psychological attributes are suggested by the body? Does the face (or eyes) reveal emotions (fear, love), mental states (intelligence, wisdom), personal qualities (ambitiousness, meanness), or social qualities (a loner, a flirt)? Do certain psychological traits predominate, if any? Are most positive, negative, or neutral? Once bodily-psychological connections are established (in 1–2 above), more general questions arise. (3) Do people generally accept bodily-psychological connections in quotations? Are some more believable than others? Finally, (4) what factors affect the acceptance of physical-psychological connections? Does it depend, for example, on age, gender, and education? Older people with more worldly experience, for instance, may be less accepting of physical-psychological correlations than the young and less sophisticated. In addition, if women are more empathic than men, as often claimed, are they more open to physical-psychological ties? These questions are examined in the next chapter in a study of the psychological meanings of the body as expressed in quotations.

chapter 11

A study of quotations on the psychological implications of the body

The psychological characteristics of the face and its components (eyes), various parts of the body (shoulders), and the body in general (beauty), as expressed by quotations, were taken from a large number of collections.1 A checklist of terms related to the body was used: appearance, attractiveness, beard, beauty, body, brow, chin, expression, expressiveness, eyes, ears, face, foot/feet, hair, head, hands, lips, mouth, neck, physical appearance, physiognomy, physique, shoulders, smile, skull. On this basis, 69 quotations were chosen, the majority (63%) by well-known authors, such as Shakespeare (with 19 quotations, the highest number), followed by Emerson (7), Longfellow and Byron (3 each), and Coleridge and Dickens (two each). Represented, too, were ancient authors (9%), mainly Greek and Roman, such as Ovid (3 quotations) and Juvenal (2). A fairly large number (28%) were by “anonymous” authors and obscure figures whose occupations could not be readily ascertained. The 69 quotations referred to 73 parts of the body: (1) the eyes (n=20; 29% of the total); (2) the face (16; 23%); (3) a miscellaneous “other” category that included hairiness, the hand, chin, neck, head, weight, the smile, and skin temperature (12; 17%); (4) appearance in general (10; 14%); (5) beauty (6; 9%); and (6) those that combined two or more areas of the body—e.g., the hair and face, eyes and mouth, and the face and eyes (5; 7%). (“There may be blame on a woman’s lip, but a smile in her eye.”) The majority (52%) was therefore about the face and its components, especially the eyes, combined with other parts of the body (chin, neck, head), and in relation to beauty. Some 82 psychological characteristics were mentioned (Mean=1.19, or slightly more than one trait per quotation). (“There are eyes half defiant, half meek and compliant.”) Most were about emotions and motives (48%; the two were combined because it was difficult to distinguish between them), followed by cognitive quotations (28%) that alluded to the mind and mental phenomena, including the intellect. (“The mind shows in the face.”) Emotional-motivational and cognitive categories were combined in a substantial number of quotations (21%). (“There can be affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.”) Finally, a small number of quotations — the “other” category (3%) — did not fall under the above two categories. Psychological characteristics, in decreasing order of frequency, were as follows:

112

Psyche and the Literary Muses Intelligence and wisdom (or their absence); gloom, sadness, and grief, or their opposites; joy and happiness (mentioned 5 times); Openness, honesty (and dishonesty), truth, and superficiality (4); Boldness, braveness, defiance, and assertiveness; threat, anger, hate, fear, and terror; murder; inquisitiveness; coldness and haughtiness (3); Cunning and calculation, disdain and scorn; mental thoughts; (the body) as a “recommendation” and as untrustworthy (2); Affection, bitterness, blaming, command, danger, folly, goodness, insult, judging, meek, passions; the secretive inner self; suppressed motives; sinister, soul, stateliness, unforgiving (1 each).

These attributes were more often cast in negative (38%) than positive terms (19%). The eyes, for example, were more frequently “insulting, threatening, and sinister” than full of “joy” or “love.” However, nearly a third (30%) of the quotations could not be assigned either a positive or negative value and were considered neutral. (The eyes “communicate and reveal.”) In addition, a modest number of quotations (13%) referred to both positive and negative qualities simultaneously. (“A fine head of hair adds beauty to a good face and terror to an ugly one.”) To summarize, quotations about the body focused largely on the face, particularly the eyes; emphasized emotions and motives more than cognitive abilities; and were more frequently negative than positive. A new question then arises: Do people accept them? To answer this question, the 69 quotations were presented to 79 college undergraduates who differed in age as well as background in psychology: 39 were upperclass majors in psychology and 40 were freshmen taking their first course in psychology. More women (63%) than men participated in the study but both were equally distributed in the two age/education groups.2 The students were told that they were participating in a study on the psychological connotations of the human face and body in quotations by historical and contemporary writers (who were neither identified nor dated). Following an illustrative quotation, the students rated their agreement with the quotations on the basis of their “experience, readings, thoughts, and feelings” on a 7-point scale where 1 (or 7) indicated the strongest agreement (or disagreement), 2(6) modest agreement (or disagreement), and 3 agreement (or disagreement). Psychology majors, it was predicted, would be more wary of psychological generalizations about the body than younger non-majors. The former are presumably more familiar with and aware of the complexities of human nature because of their age and course-work in psychology. Having learned about emotions, motives, and cognition in their classes and life experiences, they should be more cautious and skeptical about bodily stereotypes than freshman non-majors and hence less likely to accept outward physical features as indicative of inner psychological states. Another

Chapter 11. A study of quotations on the psychological implications of the body

question was whether reactions to quotations depended on gender. If women are more empathic than men, as many suppose, they should be more likely to agree with and accept psychological inferences based on bodily characteristics. The outcome: The psychological implications of the body were generally accepted (Table 11.1). Most quotations (58%, n=40) were agreed with (mean ratings were lower than 3.49). Considerably fewer (17%, n=12) were disagreed with (means were 4.51 or higher). The remainder, a quarter of the quotations (25%, 17), fell within the middle range of ratings (means ranged between 3.50 and 4.50), indicating either uncertainty or an equal number of judges who agreed or disagreed with them.3 Among quotations agreed with, about a third (35%, n=14) referred to the eyes, considerably more than the face in general (20%) and overall appearance (23%). None of the six quotations about beauty were agreed with: half were disagreed with and the other half fell in the neutral range. Most quotations about the “other” areas of the body (e.g. chin, brow) were agreed with (58%, n=7). Turning to quotations with extreme ratings, they offer a sharper focus on bodily-psychological connections. Accordingly, the 12 quotations with the highest and the 12 with the lowest agreement scores (Means= 1.73 to 2.50 and 4.65 to 5.93, respectively; see Table 11.1) were examined. This more selective sample generally paralleled the overall findings. Thus, most of the 12 highly accepted quotations were about emotions and motives rather than cognitive characteristics (8 and 3, respectively), as was the case for the entire set. Similarly, three of the four most accepted quotations referred to the eyes, as was true in general. Unlike the overall results, though, neither positive nor negative psychological qualities predominated. As for quotations strongly disagreed with, they too reflected the overall results. Quotations on emotions and motives, as was the case in general, were mentioned more often than cognitive ones (48% vs. 28%, respectively); and none of the least accepted quotations referred to the eyes, paralleling the larger finding. As was true for extremely favored quotations, neither positive nor negative psychological qualities predominated. As predicted, the background of the judges influenced the ratings: Older upperclass psychology majors accepted fewer of the quotations than freshmen non-majors: the two groups differed from one another in general, across all quotations, and for each of the six areas of the body considered separately. “A good looking woman cannot be foolish,” to take one example, was more strongly rejected by older majors than by younger non-majors (Means = 5.75 and 4.56, respectively).4 Gender was not a factor, though: judgments of quotations did not vary between men and women judges. The few exceptions, noted next, followed no consistent pattern. Women disagreed more than men on two quotations about the face while the opposite was true in three other instances. Specifically, men disagreed more than women on “A guilty conscience shows in the face” and “The face shows what you are.” On the other hand, women disagreed more than men on “A February face

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is full of frost, of storm, of cloudiness,” “The mind shows in the face,” and “What a man is lies as certainly upon his face as in his heart.” Women, though, showed more agreement than men on quotations about the eyes (Means = 2.89 and 3.92).5 In short, quotable linkages between the various parts of the body and their psychological implications were generally accepted by undergraduate judges, although some received greater acceptance than others, especially those about the eyes, face, and general appearance. The age/education of the judges also affected the ratings although gender differences did not. Notable statements (quotations) by a range of illustrious figures (mostly writers) from different cultures and times Table 11.1. Quotations about parts of the body and their psychological referents arranged from highest to lowest agreement (Mean ratings in parenthesis) 1. A silent look can still have voice and words. (1.73) 2. The eyes can insult, or, they can make the heart dance with joy. (1.85) 3. A person can be as cold as ice. (1.89 ) 4. Love lights up eyes. (1.91 ) 5. Eyes can be full of hate, or good or sinister looks. (2.13) 6. A woman can wear a smile on her lips, and have a tear in her eye. (2.14) 7. Eyes speak all languages. (2.16) 8. Eyes ask, assert, and prowl. (2.36) 9. Judge not according to appearance. (2.45) 10. A person can be as gloomy as night. (2.48) 11. You can see a grieving heart in a person’s eyes. (2.50) 12. Eyes can be as bold as lions -- roving, running, leaping. 2.53) 13. A face has voice and words. (2.59) 14. Shallow people judge by appearances. (2.66) 15. A face is like a book; both can be read. (2.71) 16. Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. (2.80) 17. There can be daggers in men’s smiles. (2.84) 18. You may smile and smile, and still be a crook. (2.84) 19. A person can look as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. (2.86) 20. People are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be. (2.97) 21. A face is as a book where you may read strange matters. (2.98) 22. The face can be the tablet of unutterable thoughts. (3.02 ) 23. The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues. (3.08) 24. A hand can be as open as day. (3.08) 25. There may be blame on a woman’s lip, but a smile in her eye. (3.08) 26. The face is the portrait of the mind, the eyes its informers. (3.08) 27. Disdain and scorn can sparkle in a person’s eyes (3.12) 28. The eyes reveal the soul. (3.13) 29. Conflcting passions are portrayed in the face. (3.21) 30. There is such a thing as an unforgiving eye. (3.26) 31. The eyes can threaten like a loaded gun. (3.26) 32. An attractive exterior is a silent recommendation. (3.27) 33. A wise head, a closed mouth. (3.29) 34. Eyes look into the very soul. (3.30)


reinforced the notion that there is a physical basis for person perception. Further, the research supported the hypothesis that people believe that the physical body communicates psychological information. External feature, rightly or wrongly, are clues to inner psychological states. These findings lend credibility to the evolutionary thesis that we are programmed to use whatever information is available to discern psychological states, and that physical features are a particularly handy means with which to do this. The attribution of emotions, motives, and cognitions to the face, eyes, and other parts of the body is a biological consequence of human history when survival depended on a quick and built-in capacity to perceive dangerous or benign potentials in the bodily features of friends or foes.6 Perception 35. There are eyes half defiant, half meek and compliant. (3.32) 36. A guilty conscience shows in the face. (3.36) 37. The mind shows in the face. (3.41) 38. The face is ofentimes a true index of the heart. (3.42) 39. The painter paints a face as if it had fully revealed itself. (3.42) 40. There’s no trusting to appearance. (3.45) 41. Suppressed motives show in the eyes. (3.58) 42. The face is the index of the mind. (3.61) 43. What a man is lies as certainly upon his face as in his heart. (3.61) 44. Man is read in his face. (3.71) 45. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. (3.79) 46. There can be affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other. (3.87) 47. Beauty is but skin deep. (3.96) 48. The secrets of the soul show up on the face. (4.01) 49. A woman’s eyes: large, sweet, and asking. (4.03) 50. Eyes like Mars threaten and command. (4.06) 51. A rolling eye, a roving heart. (4.08) 52. Murder can be seen in a person’s eye. (4.11) 53. Beauty and folly are generally companions. (4.16) 54. The face shows what you are. (4.21) 55. The Ten Commandments can be seen in a person’s face. (4.23) 56. A February face is full of frost, of storm, of cloudiness. (4.41) 57. A fine head of hair adds beauty to a good face, and terror to an ugly one. (4.46) 58. Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference. (4.65) 59. Cold hand, warm heart. (4.77) 60. A good looking woman cannot be foolish. (5.15) 61. Beauty and wisdom are seldom found together. (5.15) 62. Do not fear fat and sleek men; rather fear the pale and lean ones. (5.27) 63. There’s no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand. (5.38) 64. Fat heads mean lean brains. (5.38) 65. A pointed chin, a cunning person. (5.41) 66. A hairy body, and arms stiff with bristles indicate a man’s soul. (5.44) 67. A stately neck is manhood’s manliest part. (5.55) 68. Physical beauty is the sign of interior beauty. (5.65) 69. People who are much older than they look seldom have much intelligence. (5.93)

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is physiognomically informative (Chapter 10): we spontaneously apprehend the expressive physicality of people. In less theoretical and more neutral terms, people rely on bodily-psychological connections to make sense of an often uncertain world when information is sparse and ambiguous. Occasionally, we have to make quick judgments when there is little or no basis for doing so, as when viewing circumstances are marginal, the setting is ambiguous, and no or few details are available. A similarly automatic process probably lies at the heart of stereotypes, which explains why they are difficult to resist or change even when proven false or unreliable. Hopefully, snap judgments based on inferences from bodily features, as irresistible as they may be, can be reevaluated later under more optimal circumstances, and revised or discarded when proven wrong or useless, flawed or incomplete. The study also demonstrated the usefulness of quotations in broadening traditional approaches to the study of person perception that typically depend on artificial materials like still photos and drawings of faces.7 Humanists, literary scholars, and proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry should take heart from the accessibility of this kind of literary materials to empirical analysis. Psychologists, too, should feel encouraged to use quotations in the study of other topics, such as aging (Chapter 12). Further investigations of quotations therefore have considerable merit. Some suggestions follow. The number of quotations examined in this study (69), although as complete and comprehensive as possible, was relatively small and mainly (83%) by English speaking authors. Future research should attempt to compile a larger and more recent and diverse sample that includes non-English sources, more contemporary examples, and examples from women and minority authors. An expanded set could also better track changes in the psychological prominence given to various parts of the body over time. Some bodily-psychological connections may have emerged or dropped out at different historical periods. A larger sample also makes it possible to compare different kinds of authors (poets, playwrights, essayists). Quotations by novelists, for example, might be different from writers of briefer forms, like poetry, since the latter has less space for extended descriptions and must therefore be more selective in their choices of bodily references or their psychological implications. Quotations among authors may also differ from those by painters; and artists in general may give different weights to cognitive and emotional-motivational characteristics than scholars and scientists. Along similar lines, statesmen, jurists, military figures, and athletes may also hold different views of the psychological implications of the body. With a larger number of quotations, too, comparisons can be made between different authors, like Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dickens, as well as between literary sources, like the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey, myths, and fairy tales. An expanded set of quotations, by considering differences between nationalities and cultures, would test the universality


of the body-psychology hypothesis. A larger number and variety of judges would also expand the present findings. Middle-aged and elderly respondents may have different views of the body and its psychological consequences than undergraduates. The inclusion of more men, a minority in the present study, might also affect the results. Critical, too, is disentangling age and education, which were combined in this study. Additional factors other than gender, like occupation, might also influence the acceptability of quotations about the body. The judgments of policemen, social workers, doctors, and others whose occupations require them to be alert to body language might differ in illuminating ways. Another possibility for future research is to arbitrarily assign authors with widely different reputations to the same quotation (say Adam Smith and Karl Marx), or alternately, juxtapose it with either positive and negative reputations (Thomas Jefferson and Adolf Hitler) or a figure with a sterling reputation to one with none (President Lincoln and Tom Smith). Do we accept foolish quotations by recognized writers and reject admirable statements by nonentities? Among the many possibilities, the next section uses quotations to examine views of aging.

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chapter 12

Prologue: Aging and the arts

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I’m sixty-four? John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Old age brings a multitude of possibilities, most bad or not too bad, few good — or so many believe and with some justification. Sensory, physical, and intellectual abilities decline along with health and memory; mobility is limited as is the number and quality of relationships. Illness, frailty, and handicaps have to be managed, adjusted to, and compensated for. To be sure, there are gains in experience and maturity, and the hope for wisdom. Concerns about aging generally take the form of two questions: (1) What are the primary preoccupations of growing old? (2) Are the consequences of aging mainly negative? As we enter old age, for example, does death increasingly loom in consciousness, compared to, say, finding ways to keep active? Further, is death inevitably viewed with dread or is it accepted philosophically, even looked forward to, as “a portal to heaven”? Whatever importance death has in personal lives, and however it is evaluated, have views about it changed over time and do they vary in different societies? Until recently, these questions have been answered in predominantly negative terms, associating old age with diminished health, intellect, self-regard, interpersonal relations, and activity. Currently, though, beliefs about aging are in flux, and positive concepts, like successful aging and an optimal old age, have moved to center stage.1 The arts offer a perspective on late life that is rarely considered, providing “valid insights into the situation of the elderly over time,” for “artists cannot help revealing their basic ideas about [old age].” 2 We look first at paintings, then literature.

Paintings Portrayals of old age in paintings broadly reflect social, historical, and cultural outlooks that transcend a particular painter’s personal and unique perspective. They depict healthy, ill, strong, and frail old people, as well as relations with others, eccentricities, and reactions to growing old. Paintings have occasionally anticipated formal studies of aging, such as the distinction between active and disengaged life styles, wisdom, and the life review.3 Particularly illuminating is the


genre known as the “stages of man (or life).” 4 Essentially a developmental conception of growth, maturity, and decline, the number of stages have ranged from as little as three to as many as 12. They suggest the relative importance and complexity of growing old, the years in which old age begins, its uniqueness compared to earlier age periods, similarities and differences between the old and young, the age at which dependence ends and independence begins, the kinds of abilities that decline, remain stable, or increase, the years of greatest achievement, and how these have changed over time. Stages also trace the trajectory of aging: linear (moving forward, advancing, improving), cyclical (repeating, returning to earlier periods), evolving (changing), and stagnant. They also hint at the age at which maturity occurs (“life begins at 40”), when old age starts, and the time at which life peaks (the “full life”). More generally, representations of old age in paintings reflect positive and negative attitudes to growing old. “Western art expresses the challenges, satisfactions, sorrows, and joys in the human experience of growing old.” Paintings “effectively capture the times, joys and troubles of old age.” The old are depicted as active, relating well to others, and behaving in ways that enhance their lives, but also passive, submitting, withdrawing, and awaiting death. For Covey, pictorial representations of the old are largely negative. The majority of perceptions regarding older people have been more negative than positive … positive perceptions are not the rule. Most characteristics of old age — all but wisdom … have been generally interpreted as negative. [The romanticizing of old age] was a relative recent phenomenon … [the] golden years [referred to] one’s socioeconomic status and health [and not] on old age, per se …. The comfortable old age is thus a modern invention. Hence, the majority of images are more negative.

A doleful view of aging, Covey maintains, is understandable. [It] is far easier (and more visually interesting, perhaps) for the artist to portray physical decline than mental or spiritual growth. Twentieth-century attitudes toward old people are [that they] are devaluated by society … as being less important than young and middle-aged people [so that old people’s] own self-worth [is deprecated and] old age is inherently undesirable. 5

The lives of artists also illustrate the consequences of old age. Contrary to the romantic notion that artists die young (Mozart, Schubert), a substantial number were long-lived and maintained their abilities well into old age: Degas died at 83, Goya 82, Matisse 84, Michelangelo 89, Renoir 78, Rodin 77, and Titian 99. While the productivity of most aging artists of historical fame peaked around mid-life and thereafter declined, stagnated, or ceased, an appreciable number continued to be productive (Rubens, Goya), redirected their talents into new modes of expression (Monet), became creative for the first time (Grandma Moses), or developed a radically different late-life style (Rembrandt). As Greenberg put it, “Artists

Chapter 12. Aging and the arts

need never fade away.” 6 The representation of old age in paintings, and the latelife abilities of old painters, like conventional studies of aging, therefore present a complex pattern of what it means to grow old; outcomes are both good and bad. Is this also the case for literature?

Literature Like paintings, literature reflects individual and societal views of aging but does so more explicitly and in greater detail. Literary works “illuminate the problems of older people [that] convey the experiences of aging [and] show aging from the inside as the interpreted perceptions and feelings of individual lives.“ Treatments of elderly literary characters vividly describe what it means to grow old, their reactions to physical decline, age-related feelings and behavior, and changes over time and place. By placing “aging in a cultural and historical perspective,” literature is said to contribute to a “humanistic gerontology.” 7 Accordingly, literary accounts of aging from ancient through contemporary times have been examined because the meaning of old age can “only be appreciated by an exhaustive comparison [of Greek and Latin literature with the literature of] other societies and times.” Thus, the works of the aging Horace (20 BC), Chaucer (14th century), and other elderly writers from the Medieval period onward reveal the mood and intellectual spirit of their times. Even fairy tales illustrate “the psychological challenges of later life” and how they are met with “self-reformation, transcendence, worldly wisdom, emancipated innocence, and mediation with the supernatural on behalf of the next generation.” 8 Aging characters and themes about old age dominate such preeminent works as Shakespeare’s King Lear, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, as well as the poetry of William Carlos Williams and others (Doris Lessing, May Sarton). King Lear, for example, exemplifies the disengagement of the old from others and its consequences: social withdrawal, distancing from loved ones, a preoccupation with the self, and breaking with one’s past and society. Shakespeare’s other aging figures, like Polonius, and Falstaff, represent different perspectives on old age, reflecting the times in which they were written.9 Like painters, many aging authors continue to be productive and creative. Among the 84 Nobel Prize winners in literature awarded between 1901–1988, 45% were over 65 years old and 61% were over 60 when they won the award. The oldest was Bertrand Russell, at 98. Among the elderly awardees were G. B. Shaw (who received the Prize at 94), Winston Churchill (91), Anatole France (88), I. B. Singer (86), Herman Hesse and François’ Mauriac (both at 85), Samuel Beckett (84), Henri-Louis Bergson and André Gide (both at 82), T. S. Eliot (77), and Jean-Paul Sartre (75).10 Literary works about the old also

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affect readers. Stories about aging and its consequences, presented in dramatic, convincing, and rich detail, develop, support, as well as contradict readers’ notions about old age. A play, novel, poem, and short story about an old person or growing old gives voice to experiences, feelings, and thoughts that elucidate, in personal terms, the meaning of the later years for readers of all ages, not only the old.11 Literature therefore has the potential for revising and challenging people’s ideas about growing old, as well as supplementing and reinforcing them. Literature’s coverage of aging is considerable. The comprehensive bibliography on old age by Yanke and Eastman begins with Alain Absire’s novel Lazarus and ends with Marilyn Zimmerman’s poem “After Sixty,” and includes abstracts for 343 novels, plays, poems, short stories, and autobiographies.12 Topics range from “Activity, Adaptation, Adultery” to “Wisdom, Women, Writing and Creativity.” Some 44 topics are grouped into five major headings: (1) aging in relation to society, (2) aging and relationships, (3) aging and physical health, (4) psychological responses to aging, and (5) life events and the search for meaning in old age. “Aging and society” (1 above) includes stories about ageism, stereotypes, and gender; “Relationships” (2) covers tales of elder abuse; “Physical health” (3) presents stories on long-term care; and the “ Life events” section (4) encompasses employment, leisure, aspirations, retirement, religion, spiritual life, and death. Literary examples under “Psychological responses” (4) cover alienation, anxiety, courage, depression, deviance, humor, isolation, loneliness, mentoring, mid-life crises, serenity, suicide, vanity, and wisdom. Other topics under the psychological heading are autonomy (Bertold Brecht’s The Unseemly Old Lady, Edna Ferber’s Old Man Minick), coping (Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea), creativity (three poems by William Butler Yeats, Alice Walker’s To Hell With Dying, May Sarton’s “At Seventy,” Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport), and disengagement (I. B. Singer’s, Old Love, Emerson’s, Terminus, Jonathan Swift’s, The Immortal Struldbraggs). Creativity is covered in 2 pages with 24 entries, mental health has 1 page and 6 entries, wisdom encompasses 3 pages and 19 entries, and death spans 5 pages and 43 entries. Aside from the range of topics covered, how does literature evaluate old age? Like paintings, scientific research, and popular thought, assessments of aging are mixed: themes, plots, and characters represent both positive and negative views. Not only does literature illuminate the “losses and fears, lamentations, cures and consolations, and celebrations” of old age but also “the mixture of joys and sorrows that accompany aging.” Thus, Shakespeare’s treatment of his aging characters (e.g. King Lear) shifted from unsympathetic and ridiculing to greater understanding, respect, and sympathy as the playwright became more optimistic about physical and mental declines with age. Across a wide band of literature, from the Bible through the 20th century, the treatment of the elderly has followed a positive trend. The exception are old women who have consistently been negatively represent-

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ed. Fairy tales, too, present a generally positive picture of the elderly—except for wicked old witches and the elderly poor. In the United States, a number of literary sources, together with musical lyrics and visual materials (engravings, etchings, Currier & Ives prints, drawings, lithographs, and news photos), reflected a positive view of aging in the early years, became negative over time, and are currently moving in a more positive direction. In light of these trends, Wyatt-Brown concluded that “literary gerontology” offers a positive perspective on aging that balances largely negative views.13 However, negative themes characterized a large study of 19 dimensions of aging in 170 major literary works written over several centuries. The aged were treated with tolerance and sympathy in the 14th and 18th-centuries (the works of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Voltaire) as well as the 17th century (Molière, La Fontaine). Over the centuries, though, there were twice as many negative as positive views of old age. For example, feeble-minded and cantankerous elderly characters, and their reprehensible, malicious, harsh, and greedy behavior, were depicted more often than goodness, wholeness, and other positive qualities. The old were prone to “certain diseases [that caused] mental as well as physical breakdowns.” Comedies had more negative older characters than tragedies; stereotypes characterized the former. The “only two traits …constantly and specifically attributed to old age were wisdom and the tenacity with which the old cling to life. 14 The work of aging writers has also received varied interpretations. Some aging women writers (Sarton, Bogen, Woolf) were largely positive in their writings. Less consistently positive positions on aging, however, were expressed by five well-known professional writers aged 59 to 85 (Elizabeth Vining, Mary Sarton, Doris Grumback, Florida Scott-Maxwell, and Alan Olmstead). For example, in response to the question, “What is it like to be an older person?” no single answer emerged. Each writer reported a range of different problems, attempted to solve them in a variety ways, and arrived at solutions that involved either changing or keeping a certain style, technique, and subject matter.15

Paintings and literature compared Does literature or painting offer a clearer picture of the predominant themes of old age? From a research perspective, paintings have certain advantages. They capture a viewer’s glance and attention quickly and leave an immediate impression. A visual snapshot, compared to a lengthy reading, is therefore less subject to error, forgetting, and gaps in recall. 16 Depictions of the aged in paintings, by the same or different artists, can therefore be relatively easily compared, sorted, and rated, as can works that compare youth, middle, and old age. Paintings have disadvantages, too. They depict only a single theme about aging and do so in an isolated and


frozen moment of time that may require some effort and guidance to extrapolate. Paintings on aging and by old artists, are kept in special places, like museums and art galleries, and are therefore not easily accessible to researchers. Literary works on and by the old have advantages, too. They are widely available and reasonably priced in bookstores and free in libraries. Passages related to old age — the thoughts, emotions, and other psychological reactions and behaviors of aging characters — are easy to find for they are direct, explicit, extensive, and detailed. To their disadvantages, literary treatments may be too subtle and complex to assign to categories, count, and evaluate. Reading about aging fictional characters takes hours during which time there are interruptions and lapses in attention. With reading distributed over time and place, and given the many details embedded in lengthy literary prose, often ambiguous and contradictory, critical passages related to aging are difficult to select, summarize, and judge. Also, main characters change from the start of a story to its finish. In addition, authors’ views are personal, biased, incomplete, diverse, and often addressed to small and elite audiences. Writers are selective in choosing which aspects of aging they want to write about and idiosyncratic in how they handle them, making it hazardous to generalize across literary forms, authors, times, and locales.17 From a research perspective, literature and paintings therefore present different advantages and disadvantages. Similar arguments, of course, apply to the empirical study of any art form. But the barriers to an empirical study of literature have hampered it more than is the case with paintings (Part II).

The next step Literary works on aging may indeed be as resistant to scientific inquiry as other topics. How then should a scientific approach proceed? The strategy promoted in this book is to look at short forms. Note the ease with which attitudes towards old age are suggested by such phrases as the following: “old glory, old faithful, old Hickory [Andrew Jackson], old hand, old school tie, old buddy, old fellow, having a grand old time.” Compare these with the negative connotations of the following: “old maid, old wife’s tale, old woman [when referring to an old man], old codger, old fogey.” (Comparable negative expressions for the young are “young whippersnapper” and “young hussy.”)18 From this limited sample, one might conclude that slogans about old age are more positive than negative, focus on old men more than old women, and are more often about the old rather than the young. Similarly useful because of their brevity are song lyrics, proverbs, and epigrams about aging and the old. The point is this: short literary forms taken from the literature on aging by aged authors and presented to old readers have the immediacy associated with

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paintings and therefore share some of the same methodological advantages, noted earlier. By requiring little time to read, interference is minimized and remembering is maximized. Quotations, previously applied to person perception (Chapters 10–11), are ideal. They are a veritable glossary on what it means to grow old, a compendium of diverse perspectives on aging. In addition, they hint at whether too much or too little has been made of one or more aspects of aging in formal studies of latelife development, or if negative outcomes have been overemphasized and positive ones underemphasized. Quotations on aging, addressed in the chapters that follow, therefore illuminate prominent themes of old age and their appraisal.

chapter 13

Aging’s memorable lines A study of quotations about growing old Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust (Shakespeare, Cymbeline).

Quotations about old age from literature and related forms (biographies, memoirs, essays) are pithy, profound, effective, dramatic, and literate statements by eminent figures (Shakespeare) and well-known sources (the Bible) that command attention, hold interest, and stimulate thought. The topics covered and their treatment reflect the views of outstanding writers, philosophers, historians, intellectuals, and others of note throughout history. With quotations, old age speaks for itself. Represented, too, is a wide range of ages, occupations, and nationalities as well as gender. Quotations about old age, moreover, are available and accessible in collections where they are conveniently sorted and indexed under related headings (growing old, aging, elderly, sages). In the compilation by Sampson and Sampson, for example, quotations are organized for each decade of life, from birth to 90; about half cover the last third of life. The specialized collection by Booth contains quotations on old age exclusively by poets, writers, and essayists.1 Quotations are not only germane to multiple topics of psychology, easy to find, and conveniently arranged, but also, given their succinctness, easily sorted and scored. Various aspects of aging can therefore be counted, tracked over time, assigned positive or negative values, related to the authors’ backgrounds, and categorized according to the type of literature from which they were drawn. Many of these possibilities were addressed in the study of quotations on old age that follows. The methodology is described in this chapter while the results are reported in the next two chapters. Two related sets of questions on aging were examined: (1) What are the quotations about? Do certain topics predominate? Are they more or less the same or different from those formally studied in psychology? For example, quotations on aging may be primary about health, mostly its physical or mental aspects, and the latter could be about losses in intelligence or gains in wisdom. The most frequent topics are examined in Chapter 14. Chapter 15 revolves around the evaluations of aging. (2) Do quotations generally view old age as a bad or good time of life? What are the worst and best aspects of growing old? Alternatively, what topics of old age are treated neutrally, that is, in non-evaluative terms? A description of the study that investigated these two questions follows.


After examining 16 collections of quotations related to old age, aging, and associated terms, 1,598 quotations were chosen using the following checklist:2 death, dying, immortality, life, longevity, maturity, mortality, senility, and wisdom; old (elderly)-young (youthful) comparisons. Entries under more general headings were examined, too, such as human nature, past-present-future, and famous last words. Excluded were quotations that implied or indirectly alluded to old age, such as those about the occurrence of death without mentioning old age (some people die young or prematurely), and irrelevant references to the word “age,” as in “ages of history.” The number of quotations on aging in the sample was therefore fairly complete and probably included most on this subject. The quotations met several additional criteria, described next: 1. The quotations were brief, no more than one or two sentences, with some exceptions: highly familiar quotations, e.g., by Shakespeare; long versions of quotations that were clearer than shorter ones; and quotations from the specialized collection by Sampson and Sampson that arranged quotations by the decades to which they referred (e.g. the 60s, 70s, and so on). 2. They were in English (not Latin, unless translated) and understandable. 3. They were self-contained, that is, not requiring clarification or additional information (usually appended by the editor of the collection) to explain their relevance to aging. For example, the title of a work from which a quote came might include the phrase “old age” but the quotation itself did not. The majority of identified quotations were by recognized writers. For example, 70% of the 323 quotations in the Sampson and Sampson collection were by wellknown authors. Of eight with the highest number of quotations attributed to them, all but two were recognized writers: Samuel Johnson (16 quotations), Bertrand Russell (10), Churchill and Gide (each 9), and Jane Austin, Shakespeare, Swift, and Hardy (with eight each). (Russell and Churchill, might be considered exceptions, since they are not primarily known as writers of literature although most would call them writers of note.) Twenty-two writers had more than one quotation. To take another example, the Roberts collection extensively indexed the authors’ professions, unlike most others (Chapter 9). Again, writers were in the majority, based on a random sample of 79 names. Fifty-one per cent (n=40) were poets, novelists, and playwrights; to this total add two individuals who were both writers and composers and a third who was both a writer and a visual artist. A scattering of professions made up the rest of the sample (46%, n=36; a small number were anonymous): politicians, scholars, clergyman, lawyers, statesmen, military men, orators, philosophers, and historians. (Excluded from these counts were quotations whose authors were too obscure to be easily identified.)3 Writers were mainly represented in four other collections in which 186 quotations specified the authors’

Chapter 13. Aging’s memorable lines 129

occupations. Three professions dominated, of which most were “artists” (70%), which included writers of all kinds (e.g. essayists and journalists) along with a few musicians/composers, actors, fashion designers, and comedians. The next major occupational category, far behind artists, was “statesmen/politicians” (10%). The remaining group (20%) was too diverse to be grouped under a single occupational label (orators, philosophers, scholars, scientists, financiers, courtesans, restaurateurs, aristocrats, and figures from religion, the military, and sports). The predominance of writers in the samples reviewed above most likely describes the occupations of the authors in the other collections where the professions of the authors were not indicated or easily determined. The dominance of writers as authors of quotations is not surprising since writing, after all, is their forte. While many other authors of quotations, such as philosophers and statesmen, were not primarily professional writers of literature, they were known for their literary talents. (Churchill, a politician and historian, received the Nobel Prize for literature.) The majority in a random sample of 180 in the four collections mentioned above was English-speaking. The largest number (49%) was British (including a few Canadian and Irish authors), followed by Americans (26%) and Frenchmen (14%). The remaining quotations (11%) represented a variety of other nationalities: Greek, Roman, Swiss, Spanish, Russian, Austrian, German, and Italian. The large number of quotations by English-speaking authors (75%, combining English and American writers) may have skewed the results and will be considered later in evaluating the findings and in suggesting future direction for research. The quotations were assigned to seven large areas that encompassed 64 specific topics whose headings were taken from two different sources on aging. One set was based on the indices in the collections of quotations. For example, “Old Age” in the Stevenson collection included the expression “Facing the sunset,” which alluded to quotations about the approach of death, the physical decline of old age, and the mental losses of aging. Another entry, “Love of life,” referred to the enjoyment of old age and other positive aspects of aging. “Green and lusty” grouped quotations on the health of the elderly. Other useful index terms that subsequently became topic headings with which to assign quotations were “compensations” and “penalties [of old age],” “age and learning,” “garrulity” (talkativeness), and “old age in women: its beauty or ugliness.” Helpful, too, were the headings in the Evans collection: “age as contemptible and despised,” “fears,” “loneliness” “old age as lusty and vital,” “moral decline,” “pleasures and compensations,” “weaknesses and miseries,” and “the mutual contempt of youth and age.” The second source of age-related terms came from the indices of three scholarly works on aging and art.4 Of the 64 aspects of aging on the final checklist, more than half (38, 59%) came from the three scholarly sources. The 1,598 quotations referred to 2,246 aspects of aging (Mean=1.41 per quotation) and they fell under seven major areas: 5 (1) Personal aspects of the elderly


(primarily feelings and emotions); (2) health; (3) cognitive abilities; (4) behavior; and (5) social relations. Several diverse sets of quotations (6) were placed under the heading of “miscellaneous” and included old age as good or bad in general; the stages of life; the ability of the aged to control aging; and death. A scattering of unrelated quotations were assigned to (7) an “unclassified” heading.6 Evaluations of the quotations were based on an extensive checklist of synonyms. To receive a positive evaluation, a quotation had to contain the following words or phrases: good, noble, rewarding; a time of glory and without misgivings; an improvement, pleasure, opportunity; an occasion to love life. Synonyms for quotations judged to have a negative view of old age included bad, merciless, punishing, fearful, dreaded; losses and declines; a drag, burden, yoke, sorrow, and vale of tears; contemptible, forsaken, despised, and unwelcome.7 The quotations were assigned to a particular topic of old age and scored as positive, negative, or neutral by one investigator (the author). Thus the reliability of the scoring system may be questioned as well as the influence of personal biases on the results. To blunt (but not entirely eliminate) these possibilities for error, the scoring and coding systems were checked in several ways and these, reassuringly, were consistent (see the endnote).8 Despite the complex and rich connotations of quotations on aging, the results were not biased, at least in obvious or appreciable ways. The results of the study are presented in the next two chapters.

chapter 14

The preoccupations of aging The subject matter of quotations Quotations about old people, according to the results of the study whose method was described in the previous chapter, were mainly about relations with others, both old and young (38%, n = 859; Table 14.1). Trailing at some distance were three sets of quotations, each with almost the same number, about health, including its physical and sensory aspects (11%, n = 249); personal reactions to aging (11%, n = 239), such as whether old age was enjoyed or not; and cognition (10%, n = 227), the mental and intellectual abilities of the aged. Following at a considerable distance from the above top four sets were quotations about the elderly’s behavior (4%, n = 97), such as their eccentricities and sexual activity. A miscellaneous group of quotations on diverse and unrelated topics, like the ability to control aging, the stages of life, and death, comprised the second largest number of quotations (23%, n = 508). Rounding out these results were a few unclassified quotations (3%, n = 57). The above seven larger categories are examined in detail next. Eighteen specific topics accounted for most of the quotations (77%; Table 14.2). Two related sets (ranked 1 and 2) dominated. The first compared the young and old in general ways without evaluating them as either positive or negative (n = 305). Differences between the young and old were noted without indicating whether one age was better or worse than the other.1 If youth knew what age would crave, It would both get and save (Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia). The young shall be silent before their elders, and give them place, and rise up before them (Plato, The Republic). Table 14.1. The seven groups of quotations Group

Total number of topics in 1,598 quotations (%)

Social Relations Health Personal Reactions Cognition Behavior Miscellaneous Unclassified

859 (38%) 249 (11%) 239 (11%) 227 (10%) 97 (4%) 508 (23%) 57 (3%)

Totals

2,236


Table 14.2. High frequency topics in quotations Topics (and rank)

Group

1. old–young comparisons: general 2. old age comparisons: evaluative 3. good–bad qualities of the old 4. physical-sensory conditions 5. control of aging 6. death 7. mental abilities 8. enjoyment of old age 9. wisdom 10. old age of women 11. problems of old women 12. contributions and productivity of the old 13. strength of the old 14. personal traits-other 15. quality of relationships with others 16. ill health and aging 17. silliness and eccentricities of the old 18. esteem with which the old are held

Social Social Misc. Health Misc. Misc. Cognition Personal Cognition Social Social Social Health Personal Social Health Behavior Personal

Total

Frequency 305 249 215 133 99 97 67 66 59 58 58 57 48 48 42 42 38 38 1,720

Old boys have their playthings as well as young ones; the difference is only in the price (Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard).

The second highest number of quotations (n = 249) compared the old and young again, but this time in positive or negative terms. (Evaluations of old age, here and elsewhere, are reviewed in detail in the next chapter. Here I consider only the subjects covered.) In the following examples, old age was considered better than youth: To learn from the young is to eat unripe fruit and drink new wine; to learn from the old is to eat ripe fruit and drink old wine (Sayings of the Fathers). The old age of an eagle is better than the youth of a sparrow (Greek proverb). Youth is no philosopher (Melville, Pierre).

The reverse — the old as worse than the young — are exemplified in the next set of quotations: All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them (Jean Anouilh, Catch as Catch Can). Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished (Bible, Ecclesiastes). Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare (Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim).

Chapter 14. The preoccupations of aging 133

Other kinds of comparisons between the young and old, smaller in number than the above, are described in the endnotes.2 Quotations that referred to old age as good or bad (without comparing them to the young, as the ones above did) ranked third in frequency (n = 215). Old age is a shipwreck (Charles De Gaulle). There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle (Proverb).

Ranked fourth were quotations about the physical and sensory state of the aged (n = 133), a number considerably less than the top three noted above. Most centered on losses. Man can have only a certain number of teeth, hair and ideas; there comes a time when he necessarily loses his teeth, hair and ideas (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary). You are getting old when the gleam in your eyes is from the sun hitting your bifocals (Anonymous).

Not all quotations related to health were negative, though. There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation (Smith, Afterthoughts). The heads of strong old age are beautiful/Beyond all grace of youth (Jeffers, Promise of Peace).

Related to physical-sensory matters, broadly considered, were two specific topics with relatively few quotations: physical strength (n = 48, rank = 13) and ill health (n = 42, rank = 16). Indirectly bearing on health, too, were quotations about the elderly’s contributions and productivity (30 and 27 each, respectively; combined rank = 12). Pertaining to health under the miscellaneous set, and with a fairly high frequency (n = 99, rank = 5), were quotations on the aged’s ability to control the effects of growing old. No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year (Cicero).

Incidentally, most of the quotations (60%) on controlling aging indicated that the physical and sensory effects of aging could be ameliorated or modified: the effects of old age were not inevitable, the ravages of age could be offset, life in old age could be taken easy, and the impact of aging differed between individuals. Some examples follow. Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form (Andre Maurois). There is no short-cut to longevity. To win it is the work of a lifetime, and the promotion of it is a branch of preventive medicine (Sir James Crichton-Browne, The Prevention of Senility). Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals (S. Ullman, From the Summit of Score Years).


A fairly large number of quotations about control (40%), though, held the opposite view, namely, that old age can not be controlled: old age creeps upon us, cannot be called back, is unperceived, is inevitable. Age will not be defied (Bacon). Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man (Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile).

Another major topic with a substantial number of quotations were about death (n = 97, rank = 6). Most treated it philosophically. Death was not unwelcome, a tyrant, or bad; the old are alert to and aware of the fact of death, their own as well as others; the aged await death calmly, they “face the sunset,” and retire in peace (although they may want to live longer). Grey hairs are death’s blossoms (Proverb). The principal objection to old age is that there’s no future in it (Anonymous). Old age is …a lot of crossed off names in an address book (Blythe, The View in Winter). I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is ready for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter (Winston Churchill, from a speech on his 75th birthday). Dying while young is a boon in old age (Yiddish proverb).

Turning next to quotations on mental abilities, these ranked relatively high in frequency (n = 67, rank = 7). Most emphasized losses. Old age, mother of forgetfulness (Ibn Tibbon, Tzavaah). Age carries all things, even the mind, away (Horace). They tell you that you’ll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it very much (Malcolm Cowley). Old age plants more wrinkles in the mind than in the face (Montaigne). What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories (Maugham, Points of View).

Mental stability in the face of physical decline was also mentioned: Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together (Colton, Lacon).

Related to mental abilities were quotations on wisdom (n = 59, rank = 9). No wise man ever wished to be younger (Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects). As you are old and revered, you should be wise (Shakespeare, King Lear).

Wisdom was not always an inevitable outcome of aging. The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom (Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series).

Chapter 14. The preoccupations of aging

Falling within the middle range of frequencies, and noted earlier, were quotations on the contributions and productivity (combined) of the aged (n = 57, rank = 12). There is no such thing as “on the way out.” As long as you are still doing something interesting and good, you’re in business because you’re still breathing (Louis Armstrong). What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all; Cram in a day what his youth took a year to hold (Robert Browning).

In the middle range of frequencies, too, were quotations on the aged’s enjoyment of life (n = 66, rank = 8). To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old (O. W. Holmes. Letter to Julia Ward Howe on her 70th birthday, 27 May, 1889).

The enjoyment of old age was not inevitable, though. How rare to find old age and happiness in one! (Seneca, Hercules Aetaeus).

A diverse array of “other” personal aspects of old age contained a modest number of quotations (n = 48, rank = 14), followed by quotations on the esteem with which the old were held (n = 38, rank = 18); most affirmed it. A modest amount of quotable attention was directed to old women in general and their problems (e.g. attractiveness; n = 48 each; the two topics were tied at ranks 10 and 11). A lady of a ‘certain age’, which means certainly aged (Lord Byron). Women and music should never be dated (Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer).

Completing the top 18 topics were the following two. The first emphasized relationships with others in general (n = 42, rank = 15), a set related to the two topics ranked first and second (the aged’s relationships with the young in neutral and in evaluative terms). When thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not (New Testament, John).

The last of the two topics among the top 18 referred to quotations on the behavioral aspects of aging, the only instance which emphasized the activities of the old (n = 38, ranked 17th): silliness, foolishness, and eccentricities. Ah! there’s no fool like the old one (Tennyson, The Grandmother). Old men are twice children (Greek proverb).

To summarize, quotations on aging were dominated by relationships. These included comparisons between the young and old in both non-evaluative and evaluative terms — the top two subject areas — and the lower ranked set on the elderly’s relationships in general. Third place was occupied by a range of good and

135


bad qualities pertaining to old age. Next, and less frequently mentioned than previous topics, were physical and sensory concerns. These were closely followed by the ability to control aging and a focus on death. The above topics accounted for slightly more than half of the quotations on aging. Completing the top 10 concerns about the aged were quotations about mental abilities, the enjoyment of old age, and aging women. Note that physical and sensory losses, traditionally believed to be the preeminent fears of old age, were not dominant (they ranked fourth). Frailty and hearing loss were indeed important but not much more than controlling aging and meeting death. Unexpected, too, were the relatively few quotations about wisdom. Quotations related to mental life fell at a moderately high frequency, as did quotations on the elderly’s contributions and productivity, along with their capacity to enjoy life. Old women were a fairly substantial topic of interest but not old men — except in contrast to old women. Little was said about the materialism of the aged, their poverty, the speed with which aging occurs, and whether one can learn to grow old. (Low frequency topics are discussed subsequently.) Another way of looking at the major preoccupations of old age is to examine the quotations that were repeated in several collections. Editors of collections, inadvertently acting in concert, may have selected identical quotations because they were particularly salient and memorable statements about old age, and best expressed popular sentiments about late life. Recurring quotations, it is worth noting, generally paralleled the rankings of the subject areas under which they fell in the larger sample. For example, old-young comparisons occurred frequently among the repeats as well as in the overall findings. Eight quotations were repeated in four to six collections (and in some cases with different authors attributed to them). The most frequently repeated quotations (in six collections) compared youth with age, a theme also prominent among the seven larger headings and specific 64 topics. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together (Anonymous, Song in “Passionate Pilgrim,” 1599; or attributed to Shakespeare, depending on the collection).

Some collections used a longer version of the above quotation that further amplified the aforementioned negative qualities of old age. Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care: Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare. Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short; Youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame. Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee.

The following two quotations were repeated five times. The first was on the difficulties of learning from old age. Few people know how to be old (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes. No. 423; also attributed to Victor Hugo).

Chapter 14. The preoccupations of aging 137

The second quotation compared the young and old by pointing out the problems of both. Youth is a blunder, Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret (Benjamin Diraeli, Coningsby; or Dickens, Hard Times).

The next five quotations were repeated in four collections. The first set referred to the uncontrolled nature of aging; it cannot be halted. Age will not be defied (Bacon, Essays).

The next quotation referred to the mental abilities of the aged and suggested that an unjustified high value was attributed to them. Many a man that can’t direct you to a corner drugstore will get a respectful hearing when age has further impaired his mind (Finley Peter Dunne, Old Age).

The following frequently repeated quotation contains several negative views of the aged, such as their talkativeness and lack of courage. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon (Bacon, Essays, Of Youth and Age).

The next example once again compared the young and old: The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood (Logan Pearsall Smith).

Thirty-four topics were of relatively little interest or importance, at least for this sample: 22 were represented by 11 or fewer quotations and 12 by no more than 23 (Table 14.3). For example, only one quotation specifically mentioned the creativity of the elderly or their resistance to change; two each alluded to the old as liars, tough, and dependent; spoke of their character; saw old women as witches; and reported the old as not wanted. Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage (Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes).

Little, too, was made of poverty (n = 3). Hardly any quotations (4 each) mentioned cautiousness and testiness (despite the large number of synonyms intended to capture the latter quality: nastiness, argumentativeness, peevishness; complaining, irritable, quarrelsome; rage, anger). Old men are testy, and will have their way (Shelley). For certain people, after 50, litigation takes the place of sex (Gore Vidal).

Few (5 each) spoke of the elderly as inspiring, trustworthy, or stubborn. Scant attention was paid to the elderly’s hard life, courage, honesty, meanness, how badly they are treated by others, or their neglect (9 quotations for each). This, despite a wide swath of synonyms intended to snare many of these sentiments (humiliated,


laughed at, denigrated, degraded, not well considered, abandoned, forsaken, difficult, needing special treatment). Just because I am old, do not forget me, do not neglect me (Standard Prayer Book).

Little was made of the aged’s virtues (n = 7), learning to be old or the old as hard workers (11 each), of being hopeful (14), resigned (15), or talkative (16). Scant attention was paid to the materialism of the elderly (n = 17), which included quotations associating them with money, ownership, covetousness, greed, and avarice. Minor note was also made of the elderly’s high intelligence and contemplativeness (20 quotations each). An identical number of quotations referred to the speed with which aging occurred, with most (75%) indicating that aging occurred quickly. Falling among the relatively low frequency quotations, too, were aging’s regrets (21) and fears (23). Relatively few allusions (19) were made to the “dirty old man” or old men’s interest in sex, love, and romantic relations with women. Most (74%), though, indicated that the old were interested in these matters but this was either inappropriate or should be avoided, that is, lusts and passions could not (and should not) be fulfilled. There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we have still the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex (Samuel Johnson, Miscellanies). If age had no other pleasure than this, … it were a great one to have left all my painful and troublesome lusts behind me (Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium. Epis).

Table 14.3. Low frequency topics in quotations (n=

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