Two languages, two emotional minds in one brain: processing emotion-label and emotion-laden words by Chinese-English bilinguals

The present study examined the neural correlates of emotion effects evoked by emotion-label and emotion-laden nouns in Chinese-English bilinguals’ two languages through the emotion categorization tasks. At the perceptual processing stage, only L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden nouns induced amplified N100 than neutral nouns. At the semantic processing stage, relative to neutral nouns, L2 negative emotion-laden nouns triggered heightened EEPN, and L1 emotion-laden nouns evoked marginally smaller EEPN; only L2 emotion-laden and positive emotion-label nouns exhibited augmented LEPN; L2 positive emotion-label, L1 emotion-label, and L1 emotion-laden nouns displayed reduced N400. At the integration processing stage, L2 positive nouns showed larger LPC and L1 positive nouns displayed smaller LPC than neutral nouns. These results verified emotion word type hypothesis across languages, and also implied that emotional attributes were encoded within both perceptual and semantic representations in L2, and predominantly within semantic representation in L1.