Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Naming a feeling damps the amygdala only in a bilingual's dominant language
Tatiana Davydova's team scanned 151 bilinguals in Castelló and found naming an emotion damped amygdala activity only in a dominant native language. For people equally fluent in two languages it failed in both, so a well-known way to calm emotion now comes with a language condition.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Inside the scanner, participants viewed emotional faces, such as a picture of a sad woman, and labeled the emotion they saw in each of the two languages they spoke.
- The study builds on earlier work in which labeling an emotion in a less proficient language failed to reduce brain activity linked to emotional processing.
- That earlier result led Tatiana Davydova and Víctor Costumero to ask what happens when a person is equally proficient in two languages.
- Marc-Lluís Vives, part of the research team, does not think balanced bilinguals are therefore more likely to be overwhelmed by grief or to turn aggressive when angry.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Advice to put feelings into words assumes the benefit follows a person into any language they speak; in this study the amygdala effect needed a dominant one.
- precedent Labeling experiments that recruit bilinguals will be expected to measure each person's language balance, because pooling balanced and dominant speakers would blur the effect.
- decision Therapists who use labeling exercises with bilingual clients now have the language of the exercise as a variable to weigh when choosing how to run it.
The paper's title states the result as a condition: affect labeling down-regulates the amygdala "only in a dominant native language" [11]. A balanced bilingual has no dominant language, so for that group the condition is never met. The team had not expected this. "We were very surprised by the results," said Marc-Lluís Vives, who stayed involved in the study after moving to Leiden [13][15]. "We have no idea why this happens," he said [7]. "None of the current theories would have predicted these results." [8]
The 151 people scanned [3] came from two language pairs, Spanish-English and Spanish-Catalan, and the sample mixed balanced speakers with people who preferred one language [4]. That makes up to four subgroups, or about 38 people each if the split were even [1]. The press account does not report the real split, how balance was measured, or how large the amygdala reductions were. Those figures matter here because the striking result is an absence: a drop that did not appear. A missing effect in a few dozen scanned people is weaker evidence than a measured one, and how much weaker depends on subgroup size and the spread around each estimate [1].
The outcome was activity in the amygdala, the brain region linked to emotional processing [16]. Putting feelings into words is a well-known way to downregulate emotion, and in a dominant language it reduces the involvement of emotional brain regions [1]. The thing this doesn't tell you is whether balanced bilinguals felt any different after naming the emotion. Labeling is also one route among several. "There are other mechanisms that can help you regulate your emotions. We studied an implicit one, but you also have reappraisal, which is to try to change the way you are constructing the situation," Vives said [9].
I'd treat the finding as a real constraint on one brain measure in one laboratory task. Vives draws the same boundary. "So far, we have looked only at one specific task, performed by participants inside an MRI scanner. I can't wait to investigate these kinds of effects in settings such as therapy," he said [10].
What to watch
- An independent replication that scans more balanced bilinguals, in language pairs beyond Spanish-English and Spanish-Catalan, would show whether the missing amygdala drop holds.
- A test of whether reappraisal, the explicit strategy Vives names, works equally well in both languages for balanced bilinguals.