Language as context for emotional perception
- Dilyanova Kiskimska, Nansi
- Francisco Martínez-Sánchez Director
Defence university: Universidad de Murcia
Fecha de defensa: 07 November 2024
- José Miguel Latorre Postigo Chair
- Amaro Egea Caparrós Secretary
- Consolación Gómez Iñiguez Committee member
Type: Thesis
Abstract
Emotions are affective appraisals of the environment. They allow us to respond coherently to the evaluated stimuli and events, enhancing our chances of survival. Emotions are modulated by cultural, social and cognitive factors, which also shape language. Emotion can be described as a set of processes that occur during its experience: valuation, response, regulation and expression. Language on the other hand is a system of signals that lets humans communicate internal representations created by cognition. It is built on both biological and social ground and depends highly on culture. Language encompasses conceptual knowledge and serves a function of categorization, creating schemas about the world. Emotion words and emotion-laden words create a context in the mind that allows the development of emotion. Concrete and affective words have different representations in the brain. Bilingualism is the presence in the daily life of a person of more than one language. It is more and more present in the current society. This phenomenon shapes the metalinguistic knowledge of the person and subsequently their conceptual knowledge. It includes several cognitive and behavioural changes that affect the social development of the person and its affective appraisals. It has been widely studied and has found enhanced performance on all of the cognitive domains, but when seeing the affective studies, most of them compare bilinguals' language in the term of emotionality, but they did not compare bilinguals to monolinguals on a general emotion processing. Method. We proposed two hypotheses: bilinguals and females would have better scores (understood as an enhanced emotional processing) compared to monolinguals and males. To measure emotional processing (understood as a set of processes that start with the perception of an emotional stimuli and end with the emission of an emotional response) we used several self-assessment scales: the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ), Emotion Expressivity Scale (EES), Perth Emotional Reactivity Scale (PERS), and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Since we wanted to compare bilinguals to monolinguals, we used the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q), which helped us distribute our sample into three groups: L1 (monolinguals which speak only Spanish), L2 (bilinguals which speak Spanish and English), and L3 (trilinguals which speak Spanish, English and French). Our sample was composed by 395 psychology students (mean age = 20.6, SD = 4.72). 52.9% were females (chi-squared = 1.34, p = 0.247). Results. At a group level, the univariate analyses showed no significant differences between any of the variables. The multivariate analyses, on the other hand, found meaningful differences between groups (F = 0.799, p = 0.014), confirming our first hypothesis. At a gender level, almost all univariate analyses found statistically meaningful results in the comparison between both genders. The multivariate analyses found significant differences as well (F = 7.739, p < 0.001), confirming our second hypothesis. Conclusions and Discussion. To conclude, our two hypotheses were achieved. We found that bilinguals (and multilinguals) performed differently than those subject that spoke only one language, with a general tendency of better results than their peers. Females, as well, had enhanced results in comparison to their male peers.