People are more emotional in their mother tongue
Anyone who knows more than one language will have found that it is expressed more easily in their native language than abroad. Something normal and that now has just been corroborated by science in what refers to emotions: according to a recent study, we think more coldly in a foreign language than in the native language.
The research, carried out at the Basque Center on Cognition and Brain of Pompeu Fabra University, explains that we think more coldly in a foreign language than in our own language and that our actions are less influenced by emotions when we use a foreign language.
Emotions in the language
For the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and which Scientific American has echoed, the researchers asked a total of 126 participants who had Spanish as their mother tongue and a high level of English that respond to stimuli endowed with a different emotional charge. As they verified, the subjects responded differently according to the language they used.
During the tests, participants were shown different geometric shapes associated with words whose meanings contain different degrees of emotional charge: "other", "friend" or "you", among others. The participants had to memorize what geometric shape was associated with each term. Depending on the group to which the participants belonged, the words were presented in Spanish or English.
Upon passing the test in Spanish, the responses of the subjects were more accurate and quicker when the individuals felt the closest terms. That is, they made fewer mistakes and responded more quickly when the geometric form was related to the term "you" than when it was related to "friend"; also if it was linked to "friend" instead of "other".
On the opposite side, if they did the test in English, the results were more even among the different words. This means that the emotional implications of each word in the foreign language exerted a minor influence, even though the terms were conceptually equivalent ("you", "mother" and "other").
Emotivity of the tongue
The results of the study show that people are more emotional in our mother tongue than in a foreign one. "This study shows that, as Nelson Mandela said, if you address a person in a language that understands, those words will go to your head, but if you do it in your native language, the words will reach your heart" , says Albert Costa, researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University and co-author of the work.
