Are Bilinguals Better At Processing Emotions?
Also, Episode 2 of Love Commandos Out Now
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Let’s get to it. I respect your inbox, I have two more podcast episodes to write, so here’s a quick rundown of today’s post:
podcast drop + why I love Wednesdays
Neiman Lab announcement + meet our India team
New science about bilingualism and emotions
Poll of the Week
Happy Wednesday. New Podcast Episode.
PODCAST DROP ALERT: Love Commandos episode 2 is available right now wherever you get your Rough Translation podcast. It’s an adventurous love story about the power of movies and the pull of home. And a pet tortoise. My favorite part of this podcast is the mom. It is rare in star-crossed love stories (or most love stories) to hear from a parent who is not a cartoon villain. A real mom, a badass mom, a police detective mom, who loves her son and is ready to destroy his life for it.
Side Note: Wednesdays have always been release day for Rough Translation, because it was the day I had a standing breakfast with a dear friend. Though that breakfast tradition has faded, the day still feels full of profitable mischief. Distant enough from the Monday blues to emit a sense of hope, but with enough hours still remaining before Friday afternoon to still get some shit done and make it interesting. When NPR asked me to choose a day of the week for launch, Wednesday was a no brainer. Plus, “Happy Wednesday” feels more irreverent and less sloppy than “Happy Friday.” Am I wrong?
Neiman Lab + Bilingual Radio for Monolinguals
Love Commandos is not a bilingual series, but we wanted to make it as rich as possible for Hindi audiences. To make Love Commandos, we brought on Hindi-speaking members of the team at every stage: to translate, co-report, co-produce, and co-host. The Neiman Lab at Harvard wrote about our approach here, with quotes from team members Parth Shah (who has a producer’s ear and a novelist’s brain) and Raksha Kumar (who has the driest wit on our team coupled with a tough skin for doorstepping in a monsoon). Their comments in a google doc are always spot-on.
What you wouldn’t get from reading the Neiman Lab write-up is that we did not do all this just to widen our reach to bilingual audiences. We were also thinking about deepening the experience of the monolingual one. I hope that listeners who don’t know a word of Hindi will have a richer experience of this story because of the time and care we took with Hindi speakers in mind.
I thought of this last week when I was talking to Adelina Lancianese, a senior producer at NPR who has been living inside Love Commandos tape for the better part of a year. She was working on this season while the rest of the team was mapping the secret passage of abortion pills into and through Ukraine. (If you’re enjoying the season, give her a shout here.) Because of the time lag between receiving the tape and receiving the translation, Adelina often found herself cutting tape in a language she does not speak or understand. Then an odd thing occurred. She spent so much time with recordings of Sanjoy Sachdev, the mercurial Love Commandos founder, that she was able to sense the meaning of the words just from the speech tones. Later she’d read the translation and realize she’d often guessed right. She still doesn’t understand Hindi, but because she learned to recognize the emotional DNA of this character’s voice, she can kind of understand Sachdev-ese.
Addie’s transcendental experience with translation got me thinking about why, more than many audio journalists I know, I enjoy the challenge of working with tape that’s not in English. My job, as I see it, is to get you to lean into the human voice and connect with a person, and the fact that you don’t understand their language just makes that challenge more interesting. But why is that mission important to me? If you’d asked me that question last week, I would have said something about empathy and the power of radio. I would have said that, even if you don’t understand Hindi, I want you to hear the voice’s tones and emotional texture even before you hear the translation. I’d talk about podcasts as painting with the voice and how important it is to make foreign voices - foreign accents - feel present. All my reasons, that is, would be about the storytelling experience.
But then I saw an article last week that blew my mind and reframed the way I think about listening to emotion across language.
Are Bilinguals Better At Processing Emotions?
To Humera Sharif and Saqib Mamood, two scholars at the University of Lahore, in Pakistan, this is not even a question. They published an exhaustive review of studies on the bilingual brain and its response to emotional cues. I hadn’t even realized that the “bilingual brain” was such an area of inquiry. But apparently, besides boosting your cognitive power, strengthening your executive function, and helping stave off age-related dementia, bilingualism also changes us in the way we deal with how we feel.
(I say “us” but I mean that in the broadest humanistic sense. My Russian, the one foreign language I once spoke fairly decently, is so rusty that I think it fell off. Recently, I attempted to say a few sentences по-русски and found nothing in the garden of my brain but an undifferentiated desert where the vocab should be.)
But back to our topic. What does “processing emotions” mean?
A quick search on Google turns up this definition: emotional processing is “approaching, accepting, symbolizing, tolerating, regulating, making meaning of, and utilizing or transforming emotions.”
As might not be surprising to anyone who has said I love you in a foreign language and noticed, with giddy alarm, how much easier it flies off the lips, emotional language is less, well, emotional when you say it in a second language. Even a language you speak fluently. So, according to these studies, being criticized in a second language hurts less, reading stressful stories is less upsetting, and people make more rational (a.k.a. less emotional) decisions when they parse through the steps in a second language that is not their mother tongue.
Is it because we’re working harder to comprehend so have less brain space for emotion? Is it because we tend to learn a second language in a classroom instead of from our parents and so it’s less fraught?
As Drs Sharif and Mamood put it (I’m paraphrasing), the findings are interesting and more research is needed. Still, there is something kind of beautiful about imagining all these scientists around the world setting out to explore the emotional frontiers of the bilingual experience. Many of these scholars are from majority bilingual countries themselves. (And actually, bilinguals outnumber monolinguals around the world.) The picture that emerges from many of these studies is that bilingualism, way more than just the ability to understand another language, is more akin to having a second bedroom inside your brain that is cleaner and less cluttered than the place you usually sleep. The wall colors are more muted, but not unpleasantly so, and the decor is more clinical. In that space, as almost anyone who has spoken another language knows, we can be a different version of ourselves. In this cool, almost Spock-ian chamber, we may not always catch the subtleties or subtexts of the language being thrown at us, but we are less vulnerable to insults, stress, negative thinking. (We may even be less susceptible to advertising.) We have more control over our emotional response. That’s a power we can use, wisely. It reminds me of the advice from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, that to have a successful marriage it sometimes helps to be a little bit deaf.
People interested in this topic might also enjoy this Rough Translation episode.
Many years ago I was at a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri when she was just starting to work on her book in Italian. She said something that I think about all the time. “My mother will never love me in English” I was with a bilingual American who spoke to her mother exclusively in English & her father exclusively in Italian. She burst into tears at the recognition of those words.
The thing about bilingualism and processing emotions makes me think about the time period when I lived in Mexico and became fluent in Spanish (a language I’m no longer fluent in, because I’ve been living in Germany for the past 24 years and German has been stomping on my Spanish for so long that I can barely speak it anymore):
While living in Mexico and learning Spanish, I had a chance to practice speaking every day, practically all day long (I had to--I lived with a family who only spoke Spanish) and was surprised to see a different “me” emerge in this second language. I became a person who’d react quite strongly (emotionally), to things I found pleasurable, using flowery language like “that enchants me” (me encanta)--something I would never say in English. The fact that Spanish uses this form (it does that to me) rather than the way in English, we “do” all these things ourselves (I like, I love, I drop things).
And somehow this opened me up to things there that I didn’t and don’t like in my own culture, for example, country music (rancheras). I would sing along with the taxi driver while on longer drives, join in the group singing in a local pub when someone pulled out a guitar and started singing. Even cried while listening to Chavela Vargas singing Flores Negras. These are all things I never did while living in the States, nor have I done anything similar since moving to Germany.
Somehow, in the Spanish-speaking part of me, I am able to enjoy the passionate expressions of emotion in the cheesiest of music, in poetry, in art and film. And I feel I was a different person while I lived there.