Pioneering research by Pavlenko (2002) has attracted the attention of many researchers to the emotions of bilinguals and multilinguals. The present collection of chapters reports a number of recent studies in this new research area. The 11 contributions, written by established academics, cover various issues in emotional experience, emotional expression, and emotional representation of bilingual and multilingual speakers.
Pavlenko, the editor of the volume, first gives an overview of the chapters and introduces the main research questions in the subject. Then, in the first chapter, using the developed Web questionnaire database “Bilingualism and Emotions,” she reports on how bilingual and multilingual individuals perceive the relationship between their languages and self. Dewaele applies the same database to the study of anger expression by second language (L2) users. He examines the effects of socialization, acquisitional context, age of acquisition, self-reported proficiency, gender, educational level, and language choice for expressing anger.
Besemeres explores how emotional experience is inflected in different languages through an analysis of bilinguals' autobiographical writings. The bilinguals' narratives suggest that the experience of migrating into a new language often prompts the recognition that feelings that were previously felt to be purely personal are at least partly dependent on cultural forms. Piller and Takahashi study how the desire for English language and Western lifestyle influences the emotional experiences of young Japanese women through their romantic and sexual choices. They show that not all participants manage to change the power imbalance inherent in the emotional relationship that sets up the West as the object of desire and Japanese women as desirers and that this failure might result in dramatic outcomes. Koven addresses affective displays in the two languages of a French-Portuguese bilingual daughter of Portuguese migrants in France. His research suggests that the bilingual has two styles of affective performance specific to each of her two languages: more expressive and aggressive in French and more reserved and calm in Portuguese.
Vaid's chapter on humor and bilingualism seeks to present the perception of humor use by Anglo-American versus Mexican American individuals and the influence of cultural identity on bilinguals' humor beliefs and practices. The author suggests that members of a minority culture might use humor somewhat differently than members of a majority culture. Panayiotou focuses on guilt and shame in American English and Cypriot Greek and explores the construction of these terms in a bilingual-bicultural setting. She reports that the translation equivalents of guilt and shame are not cultural equivalents and that bilinguals use these terms differently than monolinguals. Stepanova Sachs and Coley address the question of whether crosslinguistic variability of emotion terms, such as jealousy and envy, is a reflection of the differences in the conceptual structure of emotions, testing monolingual and bilingual speakers of American English and Russian.
Altarriba applies a cognitive approach to explore emotion word processing and representation, both from monolingual and bilingual perspectives. She suggests that emotional words might not be represented in the same way across a bilingual's two lexicons. Harris et al. report findings from physiological studies (based on skin conductance measurements) of bilinguals' emotional responses to stimuli presented in their first language and L2. Schrauf and Durazo-Arvizu report their studies of emotion in bilingual autobiographical memory and advocate the use of multilevel modeling as a more advanced statistical method for the analysis of autobiographical memory data.
The volume ends with a summary and a discussion of methodological and statistical approaches. The chapters in this volume are clearly written and are easily accessible not only for experienced scientists but also for young researchers and students. Scientific analyses and discussions come in parallel with quotes from bilinguals, which makes reading especially captivating. The discursive method, widely used in the studies presented, takes into account the views and opinions expressed by bilinguals on emotions. The bibliography is thorough, relevant, and up to date, which makes it useful for any interested reader. The present collection of chapters covers a wide spectrum of issues in the field of emotions and bilingualism. The volume is therefore highly recommended to those interested in learning about emotions in bilingualism and L2 learning as well as those interested in undertaking research in this new important area.
