The paper titled "A bilingual emotional advantage? An investigation into the effects of psychological factors in emotion perception in Arabic and in English of Arabic-English bilinguals and Arabic/English monolinguals" examines potential emotional advantages of bilingualism. The study compares the performance of Arabic-English bilinguals, Arabic monolinguals, and English monolinguals in emotion perception tasks in Arabic and English, as well as their trait emotional intelligence scores.
The researchers utilized an online questionnaire containing 12 short audio-visual video clips (6 in English and 6 in Arabic) depicting various emotions. Participants had to recognize emotions like anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise and happiness in the clips. The study involved 205 Arabic-English bilinguals, 71 Arabic monolinguals, and 333 English monolinguals.
The results revealed that Arabic-English bilinguals outperformed English monolinguals in emotion perception for the Arabic videos, which was expected given the bilinguals' knowledge of Arabic. More surprisingly, the bilinguals also scored significantly higher than English monolinguals on the English videos, suggesting a potential bilingual advantage. Additionally, the bilinguals scored higher on trait emotional intelligence compared to both monolingual groups, though the effect size was small.
The study found a significant positive relationship between trait emotional intelligence scores and emotion perception performance across all participant groups. This indicates that individuals with higher emotional intelligence were generally better at perceiving and interpreting emotions in the video clips.
The researchers conclude that their findings provide evidence for a small but significant bilingual emotional advantage. They suggest this advantage may stem from bilinguals' increased awareness of emotional communication differences between languages. However, they caution that the effect sizes were small, and other factors like participant motivation may have influenced the results. Overall, the study contributes to our understanding of how bilingualism may impact emotional and psychological skills beyond purely cognitive domains.