Culture may be just as important as language when it comes to how bilingual people experience emotion. In a new study, researchers within Lancaster University’s Psychology Department have found that emotional response was not only determined by whether a word was in someone’s first language or second language. The cultural associations attached to the words also influenced how people processed them emotionally, revealing a previously overlooked link between language, culture, and emotion.

As multilingual communication becomes increasingly common, understanding how bilingual people experience and process emotional content is more important than ever. Yet, research into bilingualism has traditionally focused on cognitive processes (examining how people think and process language), with far less attention given to how emotions are experienced across different languages.

Early research found that emotionally charged words and expressions often produce stronger responses when encountered in a person’s first language (L1) than in their second language (L2). This reduced emotional resonance in a later-acquired language has become known as ‘emotional distance’.

Researchers have identified several factors that may influence this emotional distance, including language proficiency, language dominance, how frequently the L2 is used, and how long someone has lived in an environment where their second language is spoken. However, one important factor has received considerably less attention - culture.

In their paper, ‘Effect of culture relatedness on affective neural responses to words in L1 and L2’, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, postgraduate researcher Yanxi Lu, Dr Bo Yao, Professor Kate Cain, and Dr Francesca Citron investigated how culture interacts to shape emotional processing in bilinguals.

The researchers used a psychological experiment known as a valence judgement task, which measures how emotional tone affects human reaction time, attention, and processing. Participants are typically asked to classify words according to whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. In this study, the researchers selected words that are associated with Chinese culture (such as ‘rice’), British culture (such as ‘scones’), or neither culture (such as ‘sake’). The words also varied in terms of whether they are positive or neutral, such as ‘lotus flower’ or ‘chopsticks’.

Across two experiments, 34 Mandarin-English bilingual participants completed the task in both of their languages, once in English and once in Mandarin. For each word, participants indicated whether they considered it positive or neutral, while researchers recorded their reaction times and measured their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). EEG is a non-invasive technique that records the brain’s electrical activity.

The behavioural results from the valence judgement task showed that participants responded more quickly to positive words than neutral words in both Mandarin and English. More importantly, the researchers also found a significant interaction between emotion and culture relatedness in both languages.

Words associated with either Chinese or British culture generally took longer for participants to judge than culturally unrelated words. This may suggest that participants were processing additional cultural information when making emotional judgements. In other words, their responses were shaped not only by whether a word was positive or neutral, but also by the cultural meanings attached to it.

The EEG results provided further evidence that emotion and culture influenced how participants processed words. In English, positive words produced stronger early brain responses than neutral words. In Mandarin, participants’ brain activity was more strongly influenced by the cultural associations of words, indicating that cultural meaning played a particularly important role when processing words in their native language.

Together, these findings suggest that emotional processing in bilingual people is shaped by more than the language a word is presented in, their language proficiency, or how frequently they use each language. Instead, emotional responses are also shaped by the cultural meanings and associations attached to words, extending beyond the well-established phenomenon of ‘emotional distance’ in L2 processing.

The findings suggest that the brain does not respond to words based on language alone. Rather, emotional and cultural associations interact to shape how words are processed, with the study helping to shed light on the close relationship between language, emotion, and culture.

Speaking about the findings, Yanxi Lu said:

"This exploratory study presented an illuminating finding concerning the effect of culture relatedness on emotional processing in bilingual people. It provides future studies with initial evidence on the complex relationships between emotion, language, and culture. When we discuss bilingual people's emotional experiences, we may need to further consider the effect of related culture rather than just focusing on the effects of L1 or L2."