Language, Society and Subjective Experience

The availability of language codes determines the individual's ability and willingness to describe feeling states. In this study, transcendental experiences are taken as the feeling state in question. Two language codes, religiousmystical and aesthetic, are available in United States' society for describing transcendental experiences. It is suggested that the individual's choice of which code to use is dependent on his position in the social structure rather than on intrinsic differences in the nature of the experiences. Data were collected through a national survey organization. A weighted sample of 3,218 cases based on 1,553 interviews was taken. Subjects were asked a series of ten questions on whether they had had a transcendental experience, what had caused it, how frequently they had had such experiences, and whether the experience had affected the subject's life in any way. Data gave tentative confirmation to the hypothesis that the kind of feeling state does not depend on the nature of the experience, but on the person's position in the social structure. In most of life, the emotions which people feel are appropriate to the situations in which they find themselves. To the extent that they are a guide to the true state of affairs, emotional reactions lead to effective behavior and are functional in the life of the individuals. Because of this correspondence between situation and reaction, research into the determinants of the relationship between the two is difficult to conduct in natural situations. In order to study this correspondence, researchers have found it necessary 1) to arrange experiments in which this correspondence was purposely destroyed, or 2) to study pathological cases in which the correspondence between sit