Janus Monika, Bialystok Ellen
Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 28;9:1582. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01582. eCollection 2018.
Extensive work has demonstrated the benefits of bilingualism on executive functioning (EF) across the lifespan. Concurrently, other research has shown that EF is related to emotion regulation (ER), an ability that is integral to healthy socio-emotional development. However, no research to date has investigated whether bilingualism-related advantages in EF can also be found in emotional contexts. The current study examined the performance of 93 children who were 9-years old, about half of whom were bilingual, on the Emotional Face -Back Task, an ER task used to assess the interference effect of emotional processing on working memory. Bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in both 1-back and 2-back conditions but were significantly slower than monolingual children on the 2-back condition. There were significant effects of emotional valence on reaction time, but these did not differ across language groups. These results confirm previous research showing better EF performance by bilinguals, but no differences in ER were found between language groups. Findings are discussed in the context of our current understanding of the ER literature with potential implications for previously unexplored differences between monolingual and bilingual children.
大量研究表明，双语在人的一生中对执行功能（EF）有益。与此同时，其他研究表明，执行功能与情绪调节（ER）有关，而情绪调节能力是健康的社会情感发展不可或缺的一部分。然而，迄今为止，尚无研究调查在情绪情境中是否也能发现与双语相关的执行功能优势。本研究考察了93名9岁儿童在“情绪面孔-回溯任务”中的表现，该任务是一项用于评估情绪加工对工作记忆干扰效应的情绪调节任务，其中约一半儿童为双语者。双语儿童在1-回溯和2-回溯条件下都比单语儿童更准确，但在2-回溯条件下比单语儿童明显更慢。情绪效应对反应时间有显著影响，但不同语言组之间没有差异。这些结果证实了之前的研究，即双语者的执行功能表现更好，但未发现不同语言组在情绪调节方面存在差异。我们将结合目前对情绪调节文献的理解来讨论这些发现，并探讨其对单语和双语儿童之间先前未被探索的差异可能产生的影响。
