Aims: We study how emotions are represented in Polish-English and Romanian-English bilinguals, whose respective languages either mostly share emotion lexicon (Romanian-English) or not (Polish-English). We test to what extent such variance in lexical proximity between the two bilingual groups affects their decisions about emotional word content. Methodology: In a masked priming paradigm, participants viewed prime-target adjective pairs, and judged whether the target adjective was positive or negative in meaning. Primes and targets either named (emotion word) or evoked (emotion-laden word) emotions, and were either related – that is, belonged to one word type (emotion or emotion-laden) – or unrelated. Data and analysis: Behavioural data were analysed using linear mixed-effects models, with within-subject fixed effects of language, word type, valence and relatedness, and their interactions. Findings/conclusions: We found processing facilitation of emotion-laden rather than emotion words in both participant groups, irrespective of language of operation. Emotion target adjectives, particularly of negative valence, tended to slow down responses of Polish-English bilinguals in their first language. In the Romanian-English group, emotion target adjectives were recognized with lower accuracy in the second language. This pattern of results suggests that affective responsiveness is modulated by the lexical proximity between the first language and second language. Originality: Extending bilingual emotion research, this study tests how emotions are represented in languages that vary in lexical proximity with English: Polish and Romanian. We demonstrate that cross-linguistic differences between the respective languages of a bilingual impact emotional meaning processing in the first and second language. Significance/implications: We provide support for the emotion context-of-learning theory, language-specific episodic trace theory and the sense model in bilingualism, showing that cross-linguistic differences between the first and second language modulate emotion and emotion-laden word processing. Our findings also demonstrate that the distinction between the emotion and emotion-laden words is not as universal as previously assumed.

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This study investigated the relationship between thought, emotion, and language in the case of empathy and distress within C.D. Batson's Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis. The main hypothesis was that there would be significant differences in how emotion terms for empathy and distress would be processed by participants differentially conditioned to feel either empathy or distress. The secondary hypothesis was that only the emotion terms with high corpus frequency, high measures of familiarity within target population, and with manifest affective meaning component would differ significantly between the experimental conditions. The main hypothesis was partially confirmed. It was found that participants in the empathy condition processed distress terms with more accuracy and speed than they did empathy terms. Furthermore the rates of overall accuracy were significantly higher in the empathy condition than in the distress condition. The secondary hypothesis was confirmed. Items ranking high in frequency and familiarity, as well as conveying a clearly defined affective meaning component were processed significantly more accurately than the low-frequency, low-familiarity, not manifestly affective terms. The overall conclusions indicate that many contextual factors including both the external reality and the internal mental context influence the choice of emotion terms for specific feelings.

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