Interactions between emotion and language of operation on episodic memory in bilinguals

Previous studies have shown that episodic memory is affected by language. Memories can be coded with language and language is also the main modality used to recall those memories. It is also well established that episodic memory is affected by emotion, so that higher affective salience leads to better encoding. In addition, bilinguals seem to have better recognition abilities when tested in their first than in their second language. There is also evidence that emotional arousal is higher in the the first than the second language.
The aim of this project is to investigate the nature of the interaction between the three factors described above, that is, how memorisation and recall, affective salience and language use interact in bilinguals. The project aims to find evidence for such interactions both at an explicit (conscious, metacognitive) and an implicit (unconscious, automatic) level, based on records of reactions times, EEG measures and explicit answers to questionnaires.
To do so, the project will test Welsh-English bilinguals (and possibly another pair of languages, such as Spanish-English bilinguals) in three different experimental paradigms. The experiments will gradually investigate different levels of complexity and representation, namely pictures, words, phrases, and sentences. The tasks used will invite participants to observe images or videos of short interactions that could have positive, negative, or neutral affective valence. Participants will be asked to determine whether the stimuli presented have previously been shown (old) or not (new), a difference which can be detected both in overt behavioural measures and implicit measures derived from EEG.
We predict that items of higher affective valence will be recognised faster and more accurately than neutral items, with a tendency for effects to be stronger in the case of positive valence. However, it is also expected that affective items will be more likely to induce false recognition (new items identified as old) than neutral items. Language of operation is expected to modulate these effects, so that both hits and false alarms are more prominent in the first language than the second, indicative of a great sensitivity of the participant in the first language.