Ivaz Lela, Costa Albert, Duñabeitia Jon Andoni
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language.
Center of Brain and Cognition, Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2016 Mar;42(3):489-96. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000179. Epub 2015 Sep 7.
Native languages are acquired in emotionally rich contexts, whereas foreign languages are typically acquired in emotionally neutral academic environments. As a consequence of this difference, it has been suggested that bilinguals' emotional reactivity in foreign-language contexts is reduced as compared with native language contexts. In the current study, we investigated whether this emotional distance associated with foreign languages could modulate automatic responses to self-related linguistic stimuli. Self-related stimuli enhance performance by boosting memory, speed, and accuracy as compared with stimuli unrelated to the self (the so-called self-bias effect). We explored whether this effect depends on the language context by comparing self-biases in a native and a foreign language. Two experiments were conducted with native Spanish speakers with a high level of English proficiency in which they were asked to complete a perceptual matching task during which they associated simple geometric shapes (circles, squares, and triangles) with the labels "you," "friend," and "other" either in their native or foreign language. Results showed a robust asymmetry in the self-bias in the native- and foreign-language contexts: A larger self-bias was found in the native than in the foreign language. An additional control experiment demonstrated that the same materials administered to a group of native English speakers yielded robust self-bias effects that were comparable in magnitude to the ones obtained with the Spanish speakers when tested in their native language (but not in their foreign language). We suggest that the emotional distance evoked by the foreign-language contexts caused these differential effects across language contexts. These results demonstrate that the foreign-language effects are pervasive enough to affect automatic stages of emotional processing.
母语是在情感丰富的环境中习得的，而外语通常是在情感中立的学术环境中习得的。由于这种差异，有人认为双语者在外语环境中的情绪反应性与母语环境相比有所降低。在当前的研究中，我们调查了与外语相关的这种情感距离是否能够调节对与自我相关的语言刺激的自动反应。与与自我无关的刺激（即所谓的自我偏差效应）相比，与自我相关的刺激通过提高记忆、速度和准确性来提升表现。我们通过比较母语和外语中的自我偏差，探讨了这种效应是否取决于语言环境。我们对高水平英语能力的母语为西班牙语的人进行了两项实验，要求他们完成一项感知匹配任务，在此过程中他们用母语或外语将简单的几何形状（圆形、方形和三角形）与标签“你”、“朋友”和“其他”相关联。结果显示，在母语和外语环境中，自我偏差存在明显的不对称性：母语环境中的自我偏差比外语环境中的更大。一项额外的对照实验表明，将相同的材料应用于一组以英语为母语的人时，产生了强大的自我偏差效应，其大小与以西班牙语为母语的人在母语测试（而非外语测试）时获得的效应相当。我们认为，外语环境引发的情感距离导致了跨语言环境的这些差异效应。这些结果表明外语效应具有足够的普遍性，足以影响情绪处理的自动阶段。
