Acquisition and retrieval of emotional words in monolingual and bilingual populations

Abstract

The term emotional memory refers to the particular effect where emotions influence memory formation. This effect is controversial for people who use a second language. This study aims to explore the relationship between memory and emotion on Spanish-English bilingual (bl) and monolingual (ml) adults through an emotional rating task and two memory tasks. The 49 participants (15 ml and 34 bl) encoded a wordlist in either Spanish (ml and bl) or English (bl) while reporting the valence and arousal ratings for each word. All groups took a free recall and recognition task for the list immediately and seven days after encoding. For those subjects who encoded the stimuli in Spanish (ml and bl), the words had a higher emotional load than the ones encoded them in English (bl). Furthermore, the ml-group presented more intrusions than both bl-groups. Particular forms of information processing could modulate memory retrieval on emotional memory for bilinguals and monolinguals.