AFFECTIVE AUTONOMIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MONOLINGUALS AND BILINGUALS: ELICITED BY PICTORIAL STIMULI

Abstract

The main objective of the current study was to evaluate differences between autonomic responses of monolinguals and Turkish- and Kurdish-bilinguals, while pictorial stimuli with four emotional contents, including happy, relax, sad and fear was presented. The galvanic skin responses (GSR), electrocardiogram (ECG) and pulse signal (PS) of 21 college students, including seven Persian monolinguals, seven Kurdish–Persian, and seven Turkish–Persian bilinguals were collected. Estimating the maximum value of the power spectral density and some nonlinear features including Lyapunov exponents (LE), Sample entropy (SaEn), and Lempel–Ziv (LZ) complexity, significant differences were examined by means of statistical analysis. Heightened autonomic responses were found for maximum power and LZ of bilinguals in comparing to monolinguals. A reverse pattern was revealed for other measures. Another important finding was the significant differences between bilinguals and monolinguals autonomic indices; however, no significant differences within two groups of bilinguals were observed. It can be concluded that the autonomic responses to pictorial stimuli can reveal emotional differences of monolingual and bilingual individuals. The results of the current study will be of interest to the researchers working in affective sciences, psycholinguistics, and cross-cultural psychology.