Working Memory With Emotional Distraction in Monolingual and Bilingual Children.

Monika Janus,Ellen Bialystok

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01582

Abstract

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 N-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.

Highlights

Flexible and effective emotion regulation (ER) is critical for healthy psychosocial adjustment throughout development (Cole and Deater-Deckert, 2009; Eisenberg et al, 2010)
Some executive functioning (EF) tasks administered in research on bilingualism have been used in ER research to assess cognitive control as it interacts with emotional processing (e.g., Bell and Wolfe, 2004; for a review, see Cole et al, 2004)
The present study aimed to investigate the effect of bilingualism on cognitive and emotional processing that is integral to ER

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Flexible and effective emotion regulation (ER) is critical for healthy psychosocial adjustment throughout development (Cole and Deater-Deckert, 2009; Eisenberg et al, 2010). Others have reported varying speed-accuracy trade-offs by emotion type, including higher accuracy but slower RTs for negative compared to neutral stimuli in a non-verbal working memory task with a sample of schizophrenic participants (Becerril and Barch, 2011) This finding supports previous work showing that in emotionally dysregulated populations, aversive stimuli generate a significantly larger burden on the cognitive system than positive ones, depleting resources available for working memory (Bishop et al, 2004; Hare et al, 2005). Individuals low in trait anxiety did not reveal any emotion effects, either in RT or accuracy rates Taken together, these findings highlight that there are differences between how children and adults process distracting emotional information and that we continue to find inconsistent results when investigating interacting cognitive and emotional processing in typically developing children. The novelty of this research will contribute to our understanding of differences in emotional processing between groups of children with different language experiences, over and beyond the known advantage of cognitive control in bilingual children

Participants

Procedure

RESULTS

Background measure

DISCUSSION