Physiological reactivity to emotional phrases in Mandarin—English bilinguals

Abstract

Chinese—English bilinguals residing in the US were interviewed about their experience of using emotional expressions. They judged L1-Mandarin expressions as feeling stronger than L2-English expressions. Respondents nonetheless preferred to express their emotions in English, citing more relaxed social constraints in English-speaking environments. Electrodermal monitoring was conducted on a similar sample of Chinese—English bilinguals in order to determine how physiological reactivity corresponds to self-reports. For those who had both good Mandarin and good self-reported English ability, English and Mandarin emotional expressions elicited similar magnitude skin conductance responses (SCRs), with the exception of the category of endearments (e.g., Thank you, I miss you, I love you ), where larger SCRs occurred for English expressions. Given cross-cultural reports that English-speaking societies encourage more open expression of positive emotion than do Chinese cultures, hearing English endearments may have led to easy retrieval of personal situations with strong emotional resonances; these memories then resulted in increased affect and increased SCRs. However, ratings of the emotional intensity of endearments were similar in the two languages, thus conflicting with the SCR findings. Additionally, English childhood reprimands were rated as less intense than L1-Mandarin reprimands, consistent with other studies showing that childhood reprimands are felt to be more intense in the native language. Future work will be needed to understand the conditions under which physiological responses differ from self-report.

Pupillary responses to affective words in bilinguals' first versus second language

“…Overall, our results fall in line with previous findings based on skin-conductance (e.g., (20–22)) as well as pupillometry (32), suggesting that emotion word processing, and specifically emotional resonance in L1 vs. L2, is linked to activation in the Autonomic Nervous System. Thus, our study contributes to a growing body of work suggesting that (bilingual) word processing is partially grounded in physiological reactions to emotion, and that reduced emotional resonance can be detected with physiological measures.…”

“…On the other hand, Mandarin-English bilinguals showed no significant differences in emotional SCRs between languages, except for L2 endearments, which again elicited a higher emotional response than their L1 counterparts. The authors conjectured that these unexpected aspects of the findings could be explained by cross-cultural differences in norms of emotional expression (22).…”

Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition?

“…At the same time, the large number of diverse participants confers considerable statistical power, useful for discerning broad patterns of response. These patterns were then examined in studies with smaller populations, which combined the original or modified versions of the BEQ with interviews (e.g., Caldwell‐Harris, Tong, Lung, & Poo, 2011; Dewaele, 2010).…”

“…Caldwell‐Harris et al. (2011) found that late Mandarin–English bilinguals judged the L1 Mandarin to be more emotional, while early bilinguals judged the two languages as equally emotional. Caldwell‐Harris, Staroselsky, Smashnaya, and Vasilyeva (2012) found order of acquisition and AoAr effects: perceived emotionality of L1 Russian was highest in Russian–English bilinguals who arrived in the US after the age of 10 (late arrivals), lower (but not significantly) in bilinguals who arrived prior to age 10 (early arrivals), and significantly lower in English–Russian bilinguals who learned Russian as FL or L2 (Table 2).…”

“…The second dissociation involves dominance effects: the shift in language dominance and resulting L1 attrition appear to influence the frequency of L1 use for emotional expression but not perceived emotionality of the language or that of taboo words and swearwords. This finding suggests that language choice for emotional expression cannot be taken as a straightforward index of language emotionality: at times, bilinguals and multilinguals may favor a less emotional language that allows them to control their emotions and to avoid guilt associated with L1 taboo words and swearwords or anxiety associated with L1 expressions of love (Dewaele, 2004a; Pavlenko, 2005; see also Caldwell‐Harris et al., 2011). Studies of translingual writers, i.e., writers who write in more than one language or in a language learned later in life, show that the decreased emotionality of the L2, known as the emancipatory detachment effect, is the key distinguishing characteristic of L2 writing (Kellman, 2000; Kinginger, 2004; Pavlenko, 2005).…”