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No bad words for bilinguals

Brains are complicated and odd things.

Take new research from Bangor University in the UK. Researchers have found that an unconscious brain quirk dampens down people’s responses to negative words in their non-native language. Bilingual people thus respond less emotionally to words like ‘failure’ in their second language. Similarly they are less shocked to hear swear words.

“We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system. We think we’ve identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness,” study researcher Yanjing Wu, a psychologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorized about but never previously located.” (Source: Yahoo News)