Mood and gender effects in emotional word processing in unbalanced bilinguals

Abstract

Aims and objectives: We aimed to explore the relationship between mood and emotional word processing in the bilingual context, as modulated by participants’ gender. Methodology: We presented mood-inducing film clips to 28 female and 28 male unbalanced Polish–English bilinguals to put them in positive and negative moods. Participants were asked to decide if native language (L1) and non-native language (L2) single words were positive, negative, or neutral (an emotive decision task). Data and analysis: We analysed participants’ subjective mood ratings pre- and post-experimentally together with speed (a linear mixed-effects model) and accuracy (a generalised mixed-effects model) of their responses to single L1 and L2 words. Findings: The results revealed an interaction between mood and language as dependent on word valence, whereby faster reaction times (RTs) were observed to L1 than L2 neutral words only in a positive mood and to L2 positive words in a positive than negative mood. We also observed a response facilitation in a positive compared to negative mood, yet only in females. Finally, we observed faster and more accurate responses to positive and negative compared to neutral words, irrespective of gender and language of operation. Altogether, the results suggest that mood influences how unbalanced bilinguals respond to emotional words and shed a novel light on the role of participants’ gender in emotional word processing. Originality: This study extends monolingual research on emotional word processing to the bilingual context and shows how word valence modulates the way unbalanced bilinguals, being put in positive and negative moods, respond to L1 and L2 words. Our results also offer novel insights into research on mood and language, demonstrating that females can be more susceptible to mood changes than males. Significance: Our results highlight the importance of controlling participants’ mood and gender in research on emotional language processing in both monolingual and bilingual contexts.

Mood effects on semantic processes: Behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

“…One of the outstanding questions in mood research concerns the possibility of gender differences in mood-language interactions. Federmeier et al (2001) was the first to report a stronger facilitatory effect of a positive mood on semantic processing in females than males, which was later corroborated in a recent behavioural study (Naranowicz et al, 2022a). Such a female advantage in a positive mood may possibly be explained by greater sensitivity to emotions (e.g., Goldstein et al, 2001) or increased physiological reactivity to affective stimuli (e.g., Bianchin and Angrilli, 2012;Naranowicz et al, 2022a).…”

“…It has also been associated with the activation of a global, heuristics-based processing style during lexicosemantic access (Chwilla et al, 2011) and semantic re-analysis (Vissers et al, 2013). It is noteworthy that this effect may be limited to bilinguals' native language only (Naranowicz et al, 2022b) and observed mostly in females rather than males (Federmeier et al, 2001; see also Naranowicz et al, 2022a). Others have also suggested that a positive relative to negative mood may lead to increased motivation (Vissers et al, 2013) along with allocation of attentional resources to the most relevant contextual information (Vissers et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2016).…”

“…Such a pattern thus points to facilitation of lexicosemantic access to distantly related concepts. Crucially, given that the faciliatory effect of a positive mood occurred only in female and not male participants, gender might be a potential moderator of the mood-language interactions (see also Naranowicz et al, 2022a).…”

“…Finally, electrophysiological research on the moodlanguage interactions has recently been extended to the bilingual context (Kissler and Bromberek-Dyzman, 2021;Naranowicz et al, 2022b;Jankowiak et al, 2022; see also Naranowicz et al, 2022a), demonstrating that positive and negative moods may differently affect consecutive stages of L1 and L2 processing (Naranowicz et al, 2022b). In an SDT, Naranowicz et al (2022b) explored how film-induced positive and negative moods affect bilingual language processing in Polish-English bilinguals, who made meaningfulness judgements on words embedded in meaningful (i.e., expected) and meaningless (i.e., rather unexpected) sentences.…”

“…Growing scholarly attention has been devoted to a potentially reciprocal relationship between mood and language. The moodlanguage interactions have been explored in various linguistic domains, including syntactic processing (Vissers et al, 2010;Jiménez-Ortega et al, 2012;Van Berkum et al, 2013;Verhees et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2018;Yano et al, 2018), language production (Isen et al, 1985;Beukeboom and Semin, 2006;Kharkhurin and Altarriba, 2016;Hinojosa et al, 2017;Braun et al, 2019;Forgas and Matovic, 2020;Out et al, 2020), communicative interactions (Forgas, 1999;Koch et al, 2013;Matovic and Forgas, 2018), reading patterns (Bohn-Gettler and Rapp, 2011;Scrimin and Mason, 2015;Mills et al, 2019), and emotional word processing (e.g., Kiefer et al, 2007;Pratt and Kelly, 2008;Egidi and Nusbaum, 2012;Kissler and Bromberek-Dyzman, 2021;Naranowicz et al, 2022a). Arguably, semantic processing (i.e., the cognitive mechanisms engaged in language comprehension) has attracted a particularly keen interest among mood researchers, who have employed a variety of behavioural (e.g., Storbeck and Clore, 2008;Sakaki et al, 2011;Matovic et al, 2014) and electrophysiological measures (e.g., Goertz et al, 2017;Ogawa and Nittono, 2019a,b;Naranowicz et al, 2022b) to understand the principles guiding the relationship between our current affective state and how we understand language.…”