This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Say "I'm angry" out loud, and your brain reacts to it, reducing the use of emotional brain regions. But this trick does not work if you say it in your second language.
A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that it doesn't work in any language if you are a balanced bilingual. Marc-Lluís Vives is more proficient in Catalan, which he spoke with his family and at school, than in Spanish, which his mother speaks. Previous work indicates that labeling his sadness in Catalan would help him feel better, reducing the involvement of the amygdala, the brain region linked to emotional processing.
Putting feelings into words is thus a well-known strategy to downregulate emotions, preventing them from taking over. Vives completed his Ph.D. in Barcelona, researching judgment, decision-making and emotional processing in a foreign language. "After our work showing that labeling emotions in a less proficient language did not help reduce the neural activity linked to emotional processing, my colleagues Tatiana Davydova and Víctor Costumero wondered: How would this work if you were equally proficient in two languages?" Vives now works in Leiden but remained involved in the study, for which 151 people in Castelló underwent fMRI scans.
"We studied two groups of bilingual speakers: Spanish–English and Spanish–Catalan. Some were equally proficient in both languages, while others had a preferred language," Vives explains. The participants were shown, for example, a picture of a sad woman's face.
"It is well established that you absorb some of the emotion expressed by such a face." The participants had to label the emotions they saw in both languages they spoke, while the scanner showed which parts of their brains were active. The main question was: What does the amygdala do? "We were very surprised by the results.
In some participants, labeling emotions did not reduce amygdala activation in either of their two languages." The researchers discovered a new constraint on affective labeling. Their results show that it matters whether bilinguals are genuinely equally proficient in two languages. "The amygdala only deactivated when someone labeled an emotion in their dominant, native language.
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