The public image of scholars in the humanities is not one of abundant cheerfulness. From the news media to the pages of campus novels, they are pictured as grim culture warriors, bitter combatants in intellectual struggles, persecutors of innocent texts, and debunkers of comforting illusions. A more positive light is often shone on the work of scientists, who solve our problems, cure our illnesses, and build knowledge rather than demolish belief.
Is there any truth to this picture of gloomy humanists and sunny scientists? One way to answer this question is to examine their scholarship. Whose tends to have the more positive cast? Do the humanities tend to focus disproportionately on misery?
Let's do a simple exercise and comprehensively review the past decade's scholarship. ISI's Web of Knowledge database records more than 13 million items published from 1999 to 2008, in subjects ranging from acoustics to zoology. We can trawl through a few subject areas - in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences - and count how many publications in each field mention one or more positive or negative emotions. It's a crude method, but instructive.
We'll use a shortlist of emotions developed by psychology researchers. On the positive side are compassion, contentment, happiness, joy, love, pleasure, and pride, and on the negative we have anger, anxiety, contempt, despair, disappointment, disgust, fear, guilt, hatred, jealousy, sadness, and shame (yes, the English lexicon contains many more terms for describing shades of misery than varieties of happiness).
Let's start with the humanities. Are they soaked in suffering? Not at all, it seems. Two or three times as many scholarly publications in art, classics, literature, philosophy and religion mention a positive emotion as mention a negative emotion. Historical scholarship is a little glummer, but cheerfulness still easily predominates over misery.
Across the humanities, love is cited more often than any other emotion. Pleasure and fear compete for silver and bronze. Happiness outnumbers sadness by a factor of six (literature) to twenty-four (philosophy). On the evidence of our database search, sadness appears to be completely unknown - or at least unmentioned - in classics. Historical writing is more prideful than any other discipline's. Art scholarship knows (almost) no shame. Scholars of religion invoke joy more often than any others.
The social sciences are a little less blissful. Anthropology, political science and sociology mention positive and negative emotions with roughly similar frequency, but tilt towards unhappiness. Fear is the most cited emotion in political science and sociology. Anthropologist write a lot about love, but also have a lot to say about fear, anxiety and anger. Economics is evenly balanced, or perhaps ambivalent. Far from being "the dismal science", economics is the only subject in which happiness is the most-cited emotion, but fear comes a close second and no other field has more to say about disappointment.
And what of the other sciences? The physical sciences have little to say about emotion (although you never know with cosmologists), so we'll focus on the biological and behavioral sciences. In applied and clinical fields negative emotions are mentioned in many more publications than positive, with ratios of ten to one in experimental medicine and more than twenty to one in psychiatry. This imbalance should not surprise us. After all, the mission of these fields is to understand and alleviate misery.
However the same pattern emerges in the basic biosciences: publications mentioning negative emotions outnumber those citing positive emotions by factors of five (biology), fourteen (physiology), and twenty-five (neuroscience). In psychology, negative emotion dominates positive emotion by factors of around three in the more social-scientific areas to as high as twelve and fifteen in the biological and clinical domains. In all of these scientific fields anxiety is by far the most frequently cited emotion, usually followed by fear and anger.
Far from being negative in focus, then, scholarship in the humanities is much more positive, emotionally speaking, than it is in the sciences. Love, happiness and enjoyment are among its defining preoccupations. The further we move from the ‘softness' of art and literature to the ‘hardness' of brain science, the more scholarly research shifts its focus from happiness to unhappiness. A positive asymmetry turns into a more extreme negative asymmetry. The semi-firm social sciences fall in between.
Of course, the fact that humanists examine the positive side of the emotional spectrum much more than scientists doesn't mean that their approach is invariably sunny. It's entirely possible to study happiness joylessly or critically. In the humanities there is much critique of contentment and puncturing of pride. Just as obviously, scientists may investigate human misery in a spirit of empirical hopefulness. It makes good sense that many scientists should try to solve the puzzles of suffering, and that many humanists should examine happiness, love and other facets of the good life and human flourishing.
But we do need to ask whether science's focus on human misery is too unbalanced, and whether a corrective dose of positivity might be in order. Is there something wrong when fifty times as many publications in neuroscience refer to anxiety than happiness, or when thirty times more physiology publications mention fear than love? Wouldn't it be good to have a more vital neuroscience of happiness, physiology of love, biology of pleasure and psychology of compassion?
Advocates of positive psychology lament that our discipline has paid too much attention to the negative side of the affective ledger and not enough to happiness and well-being. They clearly have a point when psychology articles citing negative emotions so heavily outnumber those citing positive emotions. Positive psychologists emphasize the need to adopt a scientific approach if we are to move beyond the warm-hearted but arguably fuzzy-headed humanistic psychology of the 1960s. Needless to say, rigorous scientific work is essential if we are to understand happiness and develop ways to promote it. But if the humanities are indeed concentrations of knowledge about positive emotion, then surely we would be well advised to listen to them closely.
