Physiological reactivity to emotional phrases in Mandarin—English bilinguals

Abstract

Chinese—English bilinguals residing in the US were interviewed about their experience of using emotional expressions. They judged L1-Mandarin expressions as feeling stronger than L2-English expressions. Respondents nonetheless preferred to express their emotions in English, citing more relaxed social constraints in English-speaking environments. Electrodermal monitoring was conducted on a similar sample of Chinese—English bilinguals in order to determine how physiological reactivity corresponds to self-reports. For those who had both good Mandarin and good self-reported English ability, English and Mandarin emotional expressions elicited similar magnitude skin conductance responses (SCRs), with the exception of the category of endearments (e.g., Thank you, I miss you, I love you ), where larger SCRs occurred for English expressions. Given cross-cultural reports that English-speaking societies encourage more open expression of positive emotion than do Chinese cultures, hearing English endearments may have led to easy retrieval of personal situations with strong emotional resonances; these memories then resulted in increased affect and increased SCRs. However, ratings of the emotional intensity of endearments were similar in the two languages, thus conflicting with the SCR findings. Additionally, English childhood reprimands were rated as less intense than L1-Mandarin reprimands, consistent with other studies showing that childhood reprimands are felt to be more intense in the native language. Future work will be needed to understand the conditions under which physiological responses differ from self-report.