Language as an emotionally safe environment – Language and the Mind

The experiment that you mentioned about the Turks and the English speakers was very interesting. The native English speakers acted differently to emotionally loaded words than Turks who learned English later in life. Can we run away from a time or a place that we didn’t like and just go to a new neutral area with that? That could have so many implications.

Yes, that’s one of my favorite studies by Caldwell Harris, who I’ll just summarize up real quickly. When you hear emotionally charged words like reprimands, like “bad job” or “you did something wrong” or “stop it,” like things that would make a child have a strong emotional resonance. If a child hears that in their native language, it’s more effectively charged than if you hear it in your second language. And that’s led some people to believe, to argue, that speaking in a second language is a way of emotionally distancing yourself from the content.

One mechanism, it’s a pretty simple one, mechanism is simple when you, if you grew up speaking, these individuals grow up speaking Turkish, those Turkish reprimands actually happen to them in Turkish, in their family. And so they actually have real memories of being told they’re “bad job” or “stop it,” or you know, whatever, I can’t remember all the reprimands. And that’s a charged environment, one’s family life. But they learned English later in life, in the classroom. And when you learn a language in the classroom, it’s much less emotionally charged. It’s more academic, you know, you’re sitting there, you’re studying, there’s a teacher, you’re not being reprimanded, hopefully. In a good language classroom, that’s not really the best way to teach someone how to learn a language. And so you have more of a neutral learning context around your L2. That’s one reason why, that effect may happen.

The consequences of that are fascinating. Regardless of the mechanism of what really makes the emotional distance, the consequences are some of argued that you can think more rationally when you’re thinking in your second language. You can push down the emotional impulse and think through a problem with more level-headed clarity.

Many people familiar this idea that there’s a trolley is going to run into a person and four people. And if you pull the trolley switch, it would divert the track so it only runs into one person, and which is to kill one person other than four. It’s a logical choice. It’s called the utilitarian judgment. And if you ask AI, artificial intelligence, it’s going to have very easy answers to say, “Of course, you pull that trigger. It’s going to only kill one person.” But humans have a real hard time pulling that trolley lever. But if you have them do it in their second language, they’re more likely to behave like a computer, which is interesting. They’re more likely to say, “Yeah, pull that.” And what we think is that this second language allows you to navigate ideas with less emotional charge.

I’ll just give you an anecdote that this comes from my wife, who teaches Japanese at Colgate, and she does a speech contest where English speakers, speakers from all over the world come to Colgate. There was a contest for speaking in Japanese, and there was one American student wanted to give a speech about how during high school, his parents lost all their money and they had to live out of a car in a park for one year. He went to Senior Year in high school living out of a car. Of course, you can imagine, he was ashamed and it was just very traumatic.

He decided to give a speech on this subject in Japanese. And the reason why he could do it is he told my wife he could actually think about it for the first time ever when he thought about it in Japanese. And he said he never shared this with anyone else. And he gave a speech and he won the top prize. It was a beautiful speech and, after that, he was able to start talking about this difficult time in his life. I think that’s just a fantastic example of what you can do if you have a second language to navigate the complexities of life.

What you can do if you have a second language to navigate? Some therapists even try to help their patients who speak multiple languages by speaking their non-native language so that they can see things.

I’ll give you this example that maybe some people can resonate with. There are three words in English that are very hard for young people to say to if they’re dating or something like that; saying “I love you” is a big name in culture if a couple someone actually says that. But I’ve heard stories where someone has told their partner that they love them first in a second language because it allowed them to kind of get it out in a safer environment. So, I think that’s an example of something that probably some of your listeners have experienced.

Reference:

Ayçiçegi-Dinn, Ayse, and Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris. “Emotion-memory effects in bilingual speakers: A levels-of-processing approach.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12.3 (2009): 291-303.

This post is part of multiple topics about “Language and the Mind”, a podcast that has been published in Real Sciences with Spencer Kelly the co-director of Colgate’s Center for Language and Brain in Colgate University.

Link to Language and the mind: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-and-the-Mind/dp/B085SZ9PSZ