Emotion in Scripture

Even while we think of our modern societies as secular, 4 out of 5 people in the world today (read: 6.5 billion people) are religious. Yet, we know relatively little about how engaging with religious institutions, practices, and cultures impacts our everyday psychological and emotional experience–leaving a conspicuous chunk of human life out of our leading psychological theories and frameworks. Emotion, in particular, has long been recognized as central to religion (hello, E. Durkheim and W. James), but even more critically for understanding everyday well-being, religion may play a central role in shaping the everyday emotion of it’s constituents.

To understand what religion teaches about emotions–how to think about them, which to feel, and how to deal with them–we turned to the “source code” of religion: canonical scripture. Historical texts can provide rich insight into the individuals that wrote them, their cultures, and the change in human psychology and culture over time. We have collected and processed 9 books of scripture from 7 world religions, giving us about 2.5 million words of text. Using state-of-the-art natural language processing tools, we are working on an integrative picture of how scriptures, the historical fabric of religions, conceptualize emotion for the individuals and cultures embedded within them.