Examining Social Emotion Regulation in Spanish-English Bilinguals

People often turn to others for support in managing their emotions. This process of social emotion regulation has become a key focus of research, given its connection to wellbeing and its ubiquity in human relationships. Social emotion regulation often unfolds via language, where a support provider verbally offers perspectives that aim to improve another person’s emotional state. But what linguistic features influence the efficacy of social emotion regulation? Inspired by research showing that emotion reactivity is lower in a bilingual’s second language (L2) than their first language (L1), here we tested whether social emotion regulation is also more effective in a bilingual’s L2 than their L1. We preregistered countervailing hypotheses, as regulation could either be more effective in L1 (due to increased familiarity and fluency), L2 (due to decreased emotional intensity), or equivalent across languages. In this study, 250 Spanish-English bilinguals (~100% women) were presented with negative images before hearing audio recordings either describing the negative contents of the image or reinterpreting those contents to be more positive (i.e., social reappraisal) in either L1 (Spanish) or L2 (English). Social reappraisals lowered participants’ negative affect in both languages, but reappraisal efficacy did not differ across languages. Nonetheless, participants reported lower negative affect overall on English than Spanish trials, extending prior work demonstrating reduced emotional intensity in L2. These results suggest that Spanish-English bilinguals may equally benefit from social reappraisal in both of their languages, guiding basic research on language, emotion, and cognitive control, as well as translational applications for bilinguals.