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Aims: We study how emotions are represented in Polish-English and Romanian-English bilinguals, whose respective languages either mostly share emotion lexicon (Romanian-English) or not (Polish-English). We test to what extent such variance in lexical proximity between the two bilingual groups affects their decisions about emotional word content. Methodology: In a masked priming paradigm, participants viewed prime-target adjective pairs, and judged whether the target adjective was positive or negative in meaning. Primes and targets either named (emotion word) or evoked (emotion-laden word) emotions, and were either related – that is, belonged to one word type (emotion or emotion-laden) – or unrelated. Data and analysis: Behavioural data were analysed using linear mixed-effects models, with within-subject fixed effects of language, word type, valence and relatedness, and their interactions. Findings/conclusions: We found processing facilitation of emotion-laden rather than emotion words in both participant groups, irrespective of language of operation. Emotion target adjectives, particularly of negative valence, tended to slow down responses of Polish-English bilinguals in their first language. In the Romanian-English group, emotion target adjectives were recognized with lower accuracy in the second language. This pattern of results suggests that affective responsiveness is modulated by the lexical proximity between the first language and second language. Originality: Extending bilingual emotion research, this study tests how emotions are represented in languages that vary in lexical proximity with English: Polish and Romanian. We demonstrate that cross-linguistic differences between the respective languages of a bilingual impact emotional meaning processing in the first and second language. Significance/implications: We provide support for the emotion context-of-learning theory, language-specific episodic trace theory and the sense model in bilingualism, showing that cross-linguistic differences between the first and second language modulate emotion and emotion-laden word processing. Our findings also demonstrate that the distinction between the emotion and emotion-laden words is not as universal as previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations of the so-called 'foreign language effect' have shown that emotional experience is language-dependent in bilingual individuals. Response to negative experiences, in particular, appears attenuated in the second language (L2). However, the human brain is not only reactive, but it also builds on past experiences to anticipate future events. Here, we investigated affective anticipation in immersed Polish–English bilinguals using a priming paradigm in which a verbal cue of controlled affective valence allowed making predictions about a subsequent picture target. As expected, native word cues with a negative valence increased the amplitude of the stimulus preceding negativity, an electrophysiological marker of affective anticipation, as compared with neutral ones. This effect was observed in Polish–English bilinguals and English monolinguals alike. The contrast was non-significant when Polish participants were tested in English, suggesting a possible reduction in affective sensitivity in L2. However, this reduction was not validated by a critical language × valence interaction in the bilingual group, possibly because they were highly fluent in English and because the affective stimuli used in the present study were particularly mild. These results, which are neither fully consistent nor inconsistent with the foreign language effect, provide initial insights into the electrophysiology of affective anticipation in bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates hemispheric specialization for emotional words among proficient non-native speakers of English by means of the divided visual field paradigm. The motivation behind the study is to extend the monolingual hemifield research to the non-native context and see how emotion words are processed in a non-native mind. Sixty eight females participated in the study, all highly proficient in English. The stimuli comprised 12 positive nouns, 12 negative nouns, 12 non-emotional nouns and 36 pseudo-words. To examine the lateralization of emotion, stimuli were presented unilaterally in a random fashion for 180 ms in a go/no-go lexical decision task. The perceptual data showed a right hemispheric advantage for processing speed of negative words and a complementary role of the two hemispheres in the recognition accuracy of experimental stimuli. The data indicate that processing of emotion words in non-native language may require greater interhemispheric communication, but at the same time demonstrates a specific role of the right hemisphere in the processing of negative relative to positive valence. The results of the study are discussed in light of the methodological inconsistencies in the hemifield research as well as the non-native context in which the study was conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]