An emotional advantage of multilingualism

Abstract

The goal of the current paper is to investigate effects of multilingualism regarding emotional competence (EC). We argue that there might be two paths of influence that connect multilingualism and EC. First, we assume that multilingualism represents a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous context that may stimulate the development of EC. Second, cognitions, such as executive control or divergent thinking, might be an important condition for or constituent of emotions. Since cognitive abilities are sometimes assumed to be positively influenced by multilingualism (called the cognitive resp. bilingual advantage hypothesis), multilingualism might affect EC by boosting these cognitive functions. In an initial pre-study (N = 85) we found that two EC subcomponents were significantly predicted by degree of multilingualism (DM). In a second study (N = 989), we found that DM significantly predicted EC directly and was mediated by cultural heterogeneity but not by language switching, executive functions, or divergent thinking.