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• Bilinguals produced unusual uses of everyday objects in positive and negative moods. • Creativity increased in the second language (L2) for ideas produced in a negative mood. • This is likely due to reduced interference from a negative mood in L2. • Idea fluency increased in the first language and in a positive mood. Previous research suggests that creativity may be facilitated by a positive mood and inhibited by a negative mood. Likewise, speaking a second language (L2) has been shown to benefit creative performance. However, little is known about a possible interactive effect of mood and bilingualism on creative thinking. This question becomes more interesting in light of accumulating evidence that bilinguals experience emotional distancing in their second (L2) language compared to their first (L1) language, especially when exposed to negative emotional content. This raises the question of whether bilinguals experience reduced interference from a negative mood when generating ideas in L2 relative to L1, potentially creating conditions conducive to creative thinking. To address this question, Polish–English bilinguals were induced with a positive or negative mood through exposure to classical music excerpts and were asked to generate alternative uses for 12 everyday objects in L1 and L2. Our results show increased idea creativity in L2 compared to L1 when bilinguals were in a negative mood. This result was accompanied by decreased arousal ratings in a negative compared to positive mood in L2 but not in L1. In contrast with idea creativity, participants generated more ideas in L1 than in L2 and in a positive mood than in a negative mood. Together, we provide novel evidence for reduced effects of a negative mood on creative performance in L2 compared to L1, likely enhancing the creative potential of bilinguals when operating in L2. [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]

Neurobilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which affective stimuli are presented out of context, which is unnatural and fails to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication. Here we investigated semantic integration of affectively salient stimuli in sentential context in the first- and second-language (L2) of late fluent Polish-English bilinguals living in the UK. The 19 participants indicated whether Polish and English sentences ending with a semantically and affectively congruent or incongruent adjective of controlled affective valence made sense while undergoing behavioral and electrophysiological recordings. We focused on the N400, a wave of event-related potentials known to index semantic integration. We expected N400 amplitude to index increased processing demands in L2 English comprehension and potential language-valence interactions to reveal differences in affective processing between languages. Contrary to our initial expectation, we found increased N400 for sentences in L1 Polish, possibly driven by greater affective salience of sentences in the native language. Critically, language interacted with affective valence, such that N400 amplitudes were reduced for English sentences ending in a negative fashion as compared to all other conditions. We interpreted this as a sign that bilinguals suppress L2 content embedded in naturalistic L2 sentences when it has negative valence, thus extending the findings of previous research on single words in clinical and linguistic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]