In the current study, late Chinese–English bilinguals performed a facial expression identification task with emotion words in the task-irrelevant dimension, in either their first language or second language. The investigation examined the automatic access of the emotional content in words appearing in more than one language. Significant congruency effects were present for both L1 and L2 emotion word processing. Furthermore, the magnitude of emotional face-word Stroop effect in the L1 task was greater as compared to the L2 task, indicating that (...) in L1 participants could access the emotional information in words in a more reliable manner. In summary, these findings provide more support for the automatic access of emotional information in words in the bilinguals’ two languages as well as attenuated emotionality of L2 processing. (shrink)

ABSTRACTResearch on bilingualism and emotions has shown stronger emotional responses in the native language compared to a foreign language. We investigated the potential of purposeful second language use as a means of decreasing the experience of psychological distress. Native Swedish speakers read and answered questions about negative and neutral texts in their L1 and their L2 and were asked to rate their level of distress before or after the questions. The texts and associated questions were either written in the same, (...) or different languages. We found that within-language trials when the text was written in participants’ native language resulted in an increase of distress, whilst cross-language trials resulted in a decrease of distress. This implies that purposeful second language use can diminish levels of distress experienced following a negative event encoded in one's first language. (shrink)