Linguistic research has approached emotion word representation and processing from a myriad of perspectives –psychological, sociological, developmental, and physiological– to name a few. However, the influence of culture on emotion word processing has rarely been investigated. It is known that culture plays a key role in how individuals interact with the world and process information (Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2018). This study aims to investigate this influence of cross-cultural differences in emotion word processing. Additionally, characterizing individual and cultural differences in terms of how the brain represents emotion concepts is an important line of work that remains to be done (Adolphs & Anderson, 2018). Therefore, this study also aims to investigate the neural correlates of emotion word processing in situations when a bilingual's first and second language are associated with different cultural values.
To study the influence of culture on emotion word representation and processing this study will focus on how cross-cultural differences modulate emotional valence ratings using fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy). This study will include 60 English Chinese bilingual participants. Half of the participants will be L1 English - L2 Chinese speakers, and the other half will be L1 Chinese speakers - L2 English speakers. The stimuli will consist of 140 emotional words, 70 in English and 70 in Chinese. There will be 30 positive, 30 negative, and 10 neutral valence words in each language. Participants will perform an emotive rating task while their brain activity patterns are being recorded. We plan to utilize an 18-channel fNIRS system to record participants' cerebral hemodynamics associated with neural activity while they rate the words for emotional valence.
Data collection for this research will be complete by January 2023. Although we cannot yet report our findings, we anticipate observing differences in valence ratings of emotion words elicited by cross-cultural differences (Barret, 2017). We also anticipate finding differences in neural activity between the two populations of participants. More specifically, we anticipate enhanced activation in the prefrontal cortex for words rated higher as positive compared to those rated as neutral and/or negative (Ashby & Isen, 1999).
The proposed study highlights the relevance of applied linguistics in a real-world context. Examining cross-cultural influences on emotion word processing can lead to more effective communication and teaching practices in the classroom by raising awareness of how certain emotions and emotion concepts are perceived by learners across cultures. Additionally, a deeper understanding of cultural differences may lead to a better-cohesed society.
Adolphs, R., & Anderson, D. J. (2018). The neuroscience of emotion: A new synthesis. Princeton University Press.
Ashby, F. G., Isen, A. M., & Turken, A. U. (1999). A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition. Psychological Review, 106, 529-550.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan.
Basnight-Brown, D. M., & Altarriba, J. (2018). The influence of emotion and culture on language representation and processing. In Advances in culturally-aware intelligent systems and in cross-cultural psychological studies (pp. 415-432). Springer, Cham.
