Psychology and Literature: An Empirical Perspective

Abstract

The psychology of literature covers a very wide field. Most psychological excursions into literature have been psychoanalytic. Psychoanalytically-oriented articles account for about 80% of the entries under the category “psychology and literature” in bibliographies. The rigor with which the scientific approach can be applied to the arts is most clearly illustrated by experimental aesthetics. Founded by G. T. Fechner, experimental aesthetics was the first scientific way of studying the arts and remains its most vigorous proponent. Experimental aesthetics, in essence, seeks predictable and mathematical relationships between artistic stimuli and preferential or aesthetic judgments of these stimuli. Factor-analysis is essentially a correlational technique which allows the investigator to simplify, through statistical groupings, responses to art. Research in the arts, for the factor analysts, is guided by the search for an aesthetic factor. The hope is to discover a common denominator which underlies all the different types of and responses to art.