Event Details

Inhibitory Control as a Driver of Emotional Dampening in the Second Language

Language shapes not only how bilinguals communicate but also how they experience and regulate emotions. Accumulating neurophysiological evidence points to attenuated emotional responses to negative content in a second language (L2), converging with metacognitive reports that bilinguals often experience emotions as less intense and more distant in their non-native language. A key unresolved question is whether this subjective emotional distance reflects weaker or less efficient emotional processing in L2, or whether it instead arises from the engagement of neural mechanisms that downregulate intense emotional meaning in L2 context. In this talk, I will present findings from a series of recent experiments examining emotional word comprehension and production in late, highly proficient bilinguals. To gain a more fine-grained account of the neural processes underlying emotional dampening in L2, we used hierarchical linear modelling of event-related potentials and neural oscillatory activity across comprehension and production tasks. Together, our findings may help refine current accounts of emotional dampening in a second language and raise broader questions about the role of inhibitory control in bilingual emotion processing.

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