Understanding emotions when translating and reading: A pilot study on Dutch-English proficient bilinguals

The present work explores differentiated emotional responses in bilinguals when performing different communicative tasks. Chapter I overviews cognitive aspects of bilingualism and discusses factors impacting our understanding of bilingualism and the categorization of bilinguals. Chapter II reviews emotionality and emotional response, and focuses on its physiological measurement—in particular, electrodermal activity (EDA) and electrocardiogram (ECG)—for emotion recognition. Chapter III reports a methodological pilot study on emotion recognition in Dutch-English proficient bilinguals engaged in reading vs translating neutral vs emotional texts in(to) both their L1 and L2 as measured with both EDA and ECG and self-evaluations. As expected, reading emotional texts in their L1s led to higher physiological arousal than when reading in their L2s. Interestingly, reading of neutral texts in their L2 prompted higher physiological responses than in their L1s. Yet, the most intriguing result concerns task differences: translation tasks yielded the same higher responses than those in reading, when the source text was the same as in reading. Thus, the most interesting hypothesis to be pursued in further studies is that the levels of emotionality when translating are mainly influenced by the source text (and perhaps source language) and not by its target language.