The keynote article by Aneta Pavlenko provides a compelling framework for the mental representation of emotion concepts in the two languages of the bilingual (novice or expert), and this may very well be its most telling contribution to the literature. However, I would like to concentrate my remarks on the author's development of the notion of emotionality in the latter third of the paper. I do this, first, because it seems to me that the majority of our work on the bilingual emotion lexicon derives from studies that have been done in the absence of actual emotional experience, and, second, because I believe that the author's development of the concept of emotionality sets the agenda for the next stage of research in this field.
As it is articulated in the article, emotionality involves two dimensions. First, emotionality describes the power of particular words or phrases in a language to evoke emotion in a particular situation or to reinstate emotion from memory. The article then extends this observation to the differential effects of one language vs. the other in either evoking or reinstating emotion. Second, emotionality refers to that fact that bilinguals choose one or the other language to express emotion in a particular situation as a result of their conviction that one or the other language is more adequate to the task.
Pavlenko draws the evidence for emotionality from a variety of research literatures. As regards direct evidence for emotionality, the keynote article reviews the work of Harris and colleagues which involves tracking participants' physiological reactions (via skin conductance) in the face of exposure to emotion-laden and neutral words (Harris, Gleason and Ayçiçeği, Reference Harris, Berko Gleason, Ayçiçeği and Pavlenko2006). The indirect evidence for emotionality derives from several sources. First, the target article reviews reports from bilingual psychotherapists (all psychodynamic in orientation) with bilingual clients in which emotional expression is either tied to one or the other language, or in which clients select one or the other language in order to manage emotional experience (for review, see Perez Foster, Reference Perez Foster1998). A second strand of evidence comes from studies of bilingual autobiographical memory in which the recall of emotion in one language vs. the other is either greater in intensity or more detailed or both (for review, see Schrauf & Durazo-Arvizu, Reference Schrauf, Durazo-Arvizu and Pavlenko2006). Thirdly, indirect evidence comes from studies in which participants provided self-reports either in response to a webquestionnaire (Dewaele, Reference Dewaele2004a, Reference Dewaeleb, Reference Dewaele, Schmid, Köpke, Kejser and Weilemarc; Pavlenko, Reference Pavlenko2004) or from bilinguals' autobiographies (as described in the target article).
What is left undertheorized, primarily because of the lack of empirical studies, is the link between the languages of the bilingual and the actual, present tense experience of emotion. That is, little research has been designed to look at bilinguals' linguistic response to an emotional experience in vivo. In fact, there are benefits to setting this link aside. Earlier in the paper, Pavlenko notes that by taking a view of emotion concepts as scripts (with the attendant antecedents, appraisals, physiological reactions, behavioral displays, etc.) the paper need not take a position on the universalist/relativist debate on emotion. That is, the paper need not deal with whether the whole range (or some particularly salient subset) of human emotional experience is either pancultural or biologically universal. Bracketing this question creates the space to do the equally valuable work of making the necessary conceptual distinctions between kinds of mental representations of emotions in the bilingual lexicon. Nevertheless, by introducing the notion of emotionality later in the paper, the relation between emotional experience and emotion language is again brought to the fore.
This relation can run in either of two directions: language can produce emotion(s) or emotion(s) can produce language. Again, the best available direct evidence of the effects in the first direction (language produces emotion) is represented in the research of Harris and colleagues. The finding here is that certain emotion-laden words have more physiological resonance in one language versus the other. Indirect evidence for the effect of language on emotion is provided from Dewaele's webquestionnaire studies in which participants reported that swearwords and taboo words had more force in the first vs. the second language. Effects in the other direction (emotion produces language) rely almost exclusively on indirect evidence based on self-reports, notably in the absence of any actually occurring experience. Research on emotion and autobiographical memory involves either the self-report of reinstated emotion during the recollection of a past emotional state (in the work of Schrauf) or an analysis of the emotion words used by a bilingual in describing a past emotional state (Marian and Kaushanskaya, Reference Marian and Kaushanskaya2004). Similarly, in the webquestionnaire studies of Dewaele and Pavlenko, participants provided after-the-fact self-reports about which languages they might use or favor in particular situations. Note however that in neither the autobiographical memory work nor in the webquestionnaire work do we have any evidence for what kinds of language choices are made, or how any particular word or phrase in either language is actually produced, in the presence of a felt emotion.
Why might this be important? From a memory perspective, a study that would investigate linguistic behavior in response to emotion in vivo would have the advantage of overcoming retrospective biases that tend to color participants' responses to questions about emotion and language. Abundant research in cognitive and social psychology on autobiographical memory and emotion shows that people have a tendency to align their recall of both the intensity and the valence of past emotion with their current beliefs and notions of self (e.g. Ross, Reference Ross1989; Levine & Safer, Reference Levine and Safer2002; Schrauf & Hoffman, Reference Schrauf and Hoffman2007). Applied to the case of bilingual emotion, this implies that an individual who believes that his or her first language is more emotionally expressive might recall having spoken that first language during an emotional episode, whereas in reality he or she actually used a mix of languages or even the second language exclusively. Biases in recall of language spoken are probably not uncommon. Interesting evidence in this regard comes from Kulick's (Reference Kulick1992) work in the village of Gapun in New Guinea in which parents of small children reported speaking Taiap, the native vernacular, with their children but found that their children were in fact becoming monolingual in the New Guinea lingua franca, Tok Pisin. Careful analysis of caregiver/child speech showed that parents were codeswitching between Taiap and Tok Pisin with children, but that Tok Pisin was consistently made more salient. In effect, the language that parents reported speaking was not in fact the language they spoke – or at least not in the amount they reported speaking it. This points to a second reason why looking at bilingual emotion in vivo might be informative. Were it possible to ask a participant why he or she used this or that word, or selected this or that language, much closer to the moment in which the choice is made, we might acquire less biased (less reflected) responses, more in the tradition of protocol analysis (Ericsson and Simon, Reference Ericsson and Simon1993 (1984)) or stimulated recall (Gass & Mackey, Reference Gass and Mackey2000). Doubtless, it is impossible to discriminate among psychological motivations in any absolute way (since our access is invariably through self-report), but we may get very much closer to the actual complexity involved by asking people what they were doing at the moment they were doing it. Such investigations could benefit from the methodological advances in emotion induction (e.g. Scherer, Reference Scherer2001).
These observations are not meant to take away from the accomplishment of the target article. Indeed, one of the most important contributions here are the careful distinctions made between types of overlap in the conceptual emotional space covered by words in two or more languages with similar meaning. This taxonomy provides a metalanguage for cross-linguistic studies of emotion and for describing the acquisition of emotion concepts in second language learning. Further, embedding such distinctions in the framework of appraisal theory (Scherer, Reference Scherer, Dalgleish and Power1999) makes it possible to analyze cross-linguistic differences in emotion concepts at increasingly fine-grained levels. The article does yeomen's work in reviewing the larger literature that speaks to such analyses (much of it stimulated by the author's efforts to move the field forward by coordinating conferences, special issues, and edited volumes). This work is foundational for any investigation of what emotion words are available to speakers, which ones get used and why, across the whole spectrum of learner varieties. (In addition, this essay has far-reaching implications for restructuring our models of bilingual cognition beyond the issue of the mental representation of emotion). However, in regard to the specific issue of the bilingual emotion lexicon, the introduction of the notion of emotionality opens the door to new avenues of research, and perhaps our next steps should include a look at the phenomenon in the wild.
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The keynote article by Aneta Pavlenko provides a compelling framework for the mental representation of emotion concepts in the two languages of the bilingual (novice or expert), and this may very well be its most telling contribution to the literature. However, I would like to concentrate my remarks on the author's development of the notion of emotionality in the latter third of the paper. I do this, first, because it seems to me that the majority of our work on the bilingual emotion lexicon derives from studies that have been done in the absence of actual emotional experience, and, second, because I believe that the author's development of the concept of emotionality sets the agenda for the next stage of research in this field.
As it is articulated in the article, emotionality involves two dimensions. First, emotionality describes the power of particular words or phrases in a language to evoke emotion in a particular situation or to reinstate emotion from memory. The article then extends this observation to the differential effects of one language vs. the other in either evoking or reinstating emotion. Second, emotionality refers to that fact that bilinguals choose one or the other language to express emotion in a particular situation as a result of their conviction that one or the other language is more adequate to the task.
Pavlenko draws the evidence for emotionality from a variety of research literatures. As regards direct evidence for emotionality, the keynote article reviews the work of Harris and colleagues which involves tracking participants' physiological reactions (via skin conductance) in the face of exposure to emotion-laden and neutral words (Harris, Gleason and Ayçiçeği, Reference Harris, Berko Gleason, Ayçiçeği and Pavlenko2006). The indirect evidence for emotionality derives from several sources. First, the target article reviews reports from bilingual psychotherapists (all psychodynamic in orientation) with bilingual clients in which emotional expression is either tied to one or the other language, or in which clients select one or the other language in order to manage emotional experience (for review, see Perez Foster, Reference Perez Foster1998). A second strand of evidence comes from studies of bilingual autobiographical memory in which the recall of emotion in one language vs. the other is either greater in intensity or more detailed or both (for review, see Schrauf & Durazo-Arvizu, Reference Schrauf, Durazo-Arvizu and Pavlenko2006). Thirdly, indirect evidence comes from studies in which participants provided self-reports either in response to a webquestionnaire (Dewaele, Reference Dewaele2004a, Reference Dewaeleb, Reference Dewaele, Schmid, Köpke, Kejser and Weilemarc; Pavlenko, Reference Pavlenko2004) or from bilinguals' autobiographies (as described in the target article).
What is left undertheorized, primarily because of the lack of empirical studies, is the link between the languages of the bilingual and the actual, present tense experience of emotion. That is, little research has been designed to look at bilinguals' linguistic response to an emotional experience in vivo. In fact, there are benefits to setting this link aside. Earlier in the paper, Pavlenko notes that by taking a view of emotion concepts as scripts (with the attendant antecedents, appraisals, physiological reactions, behavioral displays, etc.) the paper need not take a position on the universalist/relativist debate on emotion. That is, the paper need not deal with whether the whole range (or some particularly salient subset) of human emotional experience is either pancultural or biologically universal. Bracketing this question creates the space to do the equally valuable work of making the necessary conceptual distinctions between kinds of mental representations of emotions in the bilingual lexicon. Nevertheless, by introducing the notion of emotionality later in the paper, the relation between emotional experience and emotion language is again brought to the fore.
This relation can run in either of two directions: language can produce emotion(s) or emotion(s) can produce language. Again, the best available direct evidence of the effects in the first direction (language produces emotion) is represented in the research of Harris and colleagues. The finding here is that certain emotion-laden words have more physiological resonance in one language versus the other. Indirect evidence for the effect of language on emotion is provided from Dewaele's webquestionnaire studies in which participants reported that swearwords and taboo words had more force in the first vs. the second language. Effects in the other direction (emotion produces language) rely almost exclusively on indirect evidence based on self-reports, notably in the absence of any actually occurring experience. Research on emotion and autobiographical memory involves either the self-report of reinstated emotion during the recollection of a past emotional state (in the work of Schrauf) or an analysis of the emotion words used by a bilingual in describing a past emotional state (Marian and Kaushanskaya, Reference Marian and Kaushanskaya2004). Similarly, in the webquestionnaire studies of Dewaele and Pavlenko, participants provided after-the-fact self-reports about which languages they might use or favor in particular situations. Note however that in neither the autobiographical memory work nor in the webquestionnaire work do we have any evidence for what kinds of language choices are made, or how any particular word or phrase in either language is actually produced, in the presence of a felt emotion.
Why might this be important? From a memory perspective, a study that would investigate linguistic behavior in response to emotion in vivo would have the advantage of overcoming retrospective biases that tend to color participants' responses to questions about emotion and language. Abundant research in cognitive and social psychology on autobiographical memory and emotion shows that people have a tendency to align their recall of both the intensity and the valence of past emotion with their current beliefs and notions of self (e.g. Ross, Reference Ross1989; Levine & Safer, Reference Levine and Safer2002; Schrauf & Hoffman, Reference Schrauf and Hoffman2007). Applied to the case of bilingual emotion, this implies that an individual who believes that his or her first language is more emotionally expressive might recall having spoken that first language during an emotional episode, whereas in reality he or she actually used a mix of languages or even the second language exclusively. Biases in recall of language spoken are probably not uncommon. Interesting evidence in this regard comes from Kulick's (Reference Kulick1992) work in the village of Gapun in New Guinea in which parents of small children reported speaking Taiap, the native vernacular, with their children but found that their children were in fact becoming monolingual in the New Guinea lingua franca, Tok Pisin. Careful analysis of caregiver/child speech showed that parents were codeswitching between Taiap and Tok Pisin with children, but that Tok Pisin was consistently made more salient. In effect, the language that parents reported speaking was not in fact the language they spoke – or at least not in the amount they reported speaking it. This points to a second reason why looking at bilingual emotion in vivo might be informative. Were it possible to ask a participant why he or she used this or that word, or selected this or that language, much closer to the moment in which the choice is made, we might acquire less biased (less reflected) responses, more in the tradition of protocol analysis (Ericsson and Simon, Reference Ericsson and Simon1993 (1984)) or stimulated recall (Gass & Mackey, Reference Gass and Mackey2000). Doubtless, it is impossible to discriminate among psychological motivations in any absolute way (since our access is invariably through self-report), but we may get very much closer to the actual complexity involved by asking people what they were doing at the moment they were doing it. Such investigations could benefit from the methodological advances in emotion induction (e.g. Scherer, Reference Scherer2001).
These observations are not meant to take away from the accomplishment of the target article. Indeed, one of the most important contributions here are the careful distinctions made between types of overlap in the conceptual emotional space covered by words in two or more languages with similar meaning. This taxonomy provides a metalanguage for cross-linguistic studies of emotion and for describing the acquisition of emotion concepts in second language learning. Further, embedding such distinctions in the framework of appraisal theory (Scherer, Reference Scherer, Dalgleish and Power1999) makes it possible to analyze cross-linguistic differences in emotion concepts at increasingly fine-grained levels. The article does yeomen's work in reviewing the larger literature that speaks to such analyses (much of it stimulated by the author's efforts to move the field forward by coordinating conferences, special issues, and edited volumes). This work is foundational for any investigation of what emotion words are available to speakers, which ones get used and why, across the whole spectrum of learner varieties. (In addition, this essay has far-reaching implications for restructuring our models of bilingual cognition beyond the issue of the mental representation of emotion). However, in regard to the specific issue of the bilingual emotion lexicon, the introduction of the notion of emotionality opens the door to new avenues of research, and perhaps our next steps should include a look at the phenomenon in the wild.