Reading a book in second language evokes less emotions!

Reading a novel or short story in a second language learnt after the mother tongue can drastically reduce physiological responses to emotions, such as smiling when a fictional character is happy, a new study has found.
When we read a novel or a short story: we literally replicate the physiological processes and emotions of the characters described in the text.
Francesco Foroni, research scientist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, had demonstrated this phenomenon in a previous study.
In the new study, he showed what happens when we read in a second language learnt in adulthood.
"The interpretation of these phenomena is accounted for by the theory of embodiment - when we process emotional information, our body 'mimics' the specific emotion by enacting those physiological states that are typical of the emotion," said Foroni.

This means, he explained, that when we read about a happy person we smile, whereas if the character is angry we frown (in most cases, these expressions are imperceptible and we are not necessarily aware of them).

"The phenomenon is very intense when we read in our native language but, according to the new study, if we read in a second language learnt after our mother tongue, then this physiological response, while not disappearing completely, is drastically lessened," said Foroni.
Foroni measured the facial expressions of 26 subjects reading texts in English, by electromyography, a technique that records muscle activation.

The subjects were Dutch native speakers who had learnt English at school after the age of twelve.
Differently from what was observed in their mother tongue, the facial expressions recorded in response to emotional content were much blander.
The result is in bearing with the embodiment theories. In fact, this view states that we normally learn emotional words 'first hand' in emotional contexts (our mother smiling as she asks us to smile at her, for example), whereas a second language is normally acquired in less emotional environments and using formal methods, for example, at school.
Thus the association between the word representing the emotion and the experience of the emotion itself is looser, the researchers said, which is why milder responses were observed in the study.

The study was published in the journal Brain and Cognition.