The impact of emotional states on bilingual language control in cued and voluntary switching contexts

Abstract

This study investigated bilingual language control in emotional contexts. We assessed the language switching and mixing performance of two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals in picture naming under neutral, negative, and positive emotional states. One group switched languages voluntarily while another matched group switched languages according to external cues. We found that negative state impaired proactive control, whereas positive state seemed to improve proactive control. Importantly, the detrimental effects of negative state could be proportional to the cognitive demands imposed by the naming context. However, negative states disrupted proactive control in voluntary but not cued naming, where the proactive control demands were comparable. This finding suggests that the control system selectively compensates for the emotional disruption of control in a cued-naming context requiring strict control but not in a voluntary-naming context preferring less strict control. Accordingly, we tentatively proposed a theoretical account of the adaptive control mechanism in emotional contexts. These findings would extend the Adaptive Control Hypothesis to more naturalistic settings.