Poster E41, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
The Foreign Language Effect in Moral Decision Making and Social Controversies: The Role of Emotion in Chinese-English Bilinguals' Decision
Angela Tzeng1, Yi Lin Chen1;1Chung Yuan Christian University
In moral decision making utilitarian choices refer to the behavior that produces the greatest good whereas deontological choices refer to behavior adheres to moral rules and principles. In some studies, bilinguals were recruited as the participants to investigate whether there be any difference when moral dilemmas are presented in the native language (NL) or foreign language (FL). The Foreign Language Effect (FLe) refers to the phenomenon that more utilitarian choices are made when moral dilemmas are presented in FL rather than in NL. FLe is repeatedly found in bilingual studies when NL and FL are both Indo-European languages. Moreover, the emotion was proposed as one of the key factors to produce FLe because emotion would be automatically activated while using NL. In other words, less emotion involvement in FL helps to produce more utilitarian choices. There are two purposes for the present study. The first aim is to replicate FLe using Chinese-English bilinguals. The second aim is to investigate the role the emotion plays in FLe using social controversies. Two experiments were conducted respectively. Six moral dilemmas were presented in both Chinese and English in the first experiment. The participants were 118 Chinese-English bilinguals. A 2 (NL vs. FL) x 3 (three dilemma types: personal, impersonal, and non-moral) design was employed. FLe was replicated. More utilitarian judgments were made when materials were presented in English with F(1, 694) = 4.139, p <.5. In the second experiment, the emotion was manipulated in the implicit priming paradigm. Both behavioral and brainwave data were collected. A 2 (NL vs. FL) x 3 (types of primes: positive, negative, neutral) design was introduced. In each trial, a fixation point was presented, followed by the prime, and ended with a controversial social issue (e.g., death penalty). Thirty-four social issues were chosen with the average rating of controversy of 6.75 on a 7-point scale. All materials were presented in both Chinese and English. Participants were 38 Chinese-English bilinguals. They were to respond to their own attitude and what they thought the public would think of these issues. Their attitudes, reaction time, as well as ERPs were recorded. Behavioral results showed that participants were less affected by emotion primes in English. Besides, the social and personal attitudes were more consist of when issues were presented in English. These findings were consistent with FLe literature in that less emotional involvement in FL. For ERP data, N400, and LPP were chosen as the indicators of semantic and emotional processes, respectively. The results showed that N400 amplitudes were more negative-going in Chinese than in English. Furthermore, LPP was more significant with positive primes than negative primes. Both N400 and LPP showed more emotional influence in NL than in FL. We, therefore, conclude FLe was found in Chinese-English bilinguals. And in both moral dilemmas and social controversies, the more emotional influence was found in NL. Future studies can be conducted to investigate the mechanism of how emotion works in FLe.
Themes: Multilingualism, Methods
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)