“Pearls Strung on a Thread”: Assessing Interactions Between Faith and Emotive State Across World Religions

Abstract

The role of religion in the human experience has captivated psychologists since the field’s earliest days. But the field has also pitted psychologists’ and their theories against each other for years as well, from Freud’s earliest denunciations of religion as something delusional to William James’ understanding of it as inseparable from the study of the human psyche. Today, most studies agree that religion has a positive influence on life. Most studies have focused on the emotions that people (usually Christians) have in the current moment. However, less research has focused on the emotional lives people wish that they had in comparison to their lived experience, and almost no studies have looked at this relationship across different religions and their texts. This paper reviews the existing literature on the interactions between faith and emotions, examines differences between individualistic religions (hypothesized to be Hinduism, Buddhism) and collectivistic religions (hypothesized to be Christianity, Judaism, Islam) in the experience of inward-directed versus outward-directed emotions, details the importance of temporal considerations in religion research by comparing contradictory findings about Muslims and shame, previews emerging data about Hindus and belonging, highlights the possible presence of “undertone emotions” in a person’s emotional canvas, contributes a novel finding about in-group versus out-group bias to stereotype literature, and demonstrates an entire array of methodological approaches to studying the field, including natural language processing and semantic analysis of holy texts. Findings are numerous, with several having the potential to fundamentally revamp the landscape of research in this field for ages to come.