Resumen de The impact of foreign language processing on judgments, decisions and emotions
Foreign language processing is hard, sometimes the right words do not come out, sometimes phonemes are incompressible. Words also lose their emotional appeal in a foreign language. How does this affect people’s lives? A recent line of research suggests that it changes their decisions and moral judgments, the so-called foreign language effect. We aim to shed some light on the pervasiveness and origin of the effect. We did so by exploring the foreign language effect on the outcome bias (Chapter I), the representativeness heuristic (Chapter I), and intertemporal choices (Chapter II). In the third chapter, we went a step further and explored how foreign language processing affected emotionality not directly caused by language. Results revealed that: 1) Foreign language processing is unlikely to affect decisions that are independent of emotion (Chapters 1 & 2), 2) Once emotion is relevant to the decision at hand, a foreign language effect is present (Chapter II), and 3) Although a foreign language is less emotional, its use does not regulate emotional arousal (Chapter III). Overall, the prevalence of the foreign language effect might be reduced to emotional contexts, emotions that are not reduced in a foreign language when they are not directly caused by the language.
