Jeanette Altarriba

University at Albany, State University of New York | UAlbany · Department of Psychology

Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Advances in Understanding Adaptive Memory presents the latest theories and research on what is known about adaptive memory, often referred to as survival memory. Conceptually, this is the study of memory systems that evolved to aid remembering survival and fitness-relevant information. In this volume survival is...

Aims and Objectives This study aimed to examine how bilinguals express their emotions in their first language (L1) versus their second language (L2) in autobiographical narratives. Methodology A total of 64 Egyptian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) took an English language proficiency test, and wrote about the happiest or saddest ex...

This paper explores the conceptualization differences between the prototypical categories of six basic emotions ( anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise ) in English and Polish lexicalizations of these concepts in noun, verb, and adjective forms. Measures of valence, arousal, and dominance were collected and analyzed across the six semantic c...

The current study aimed to examine the processing of emotion words in L2 silent reading. We conducted two experiments in which Arab learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) read short English sentences in which target words were embedded. The participants' eye movements were recorded and analyzed. The results of Experiment 1, which compared...

This study explored the role of information sources in vaccine decision-making among four culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities—Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, and Spanish-speaking in the U.S. Specifically, research questions focused on examining: (a) the decision to vaccinate against COVID-19 and whether it differs across members of t...

Research focused on the study of cultural socialization is of great importance to the study of developmental psychology. The current chapter examines cultural influences on emotion socialization practices of parents, siblings, teachers, and peers across early childhood and adolescence. In particular, the chapter focuses on how children and adolesce...

Research using traditional experimental paradigms (e.g., Priming, Stroop and Simon tasks), narratives and interview type data have revealed that bilingual speakers process and express emotion differently in their two languages. In the current study, both a qualitative and quantitative approach were taken to investigate how individuals who know and...

The current chapter aims to provide a brief overview of recent interdisciplinary approaches to the study of emotions. To this end, we describe the traditional approach to the study of emotions which mainly focuses on decontextualization. Then, we compare this traditional approach with more recent approaches to the study of emotions that call for th...

This chapter presents the broad field of language-based approaches and their relation to emotions in three major parts, beginning with theoretical principles and selected research developments. The first part addresses why both historical and systematic dimensions of emotion semiotics are of utmost relevance for the study of language and emotion. T...

For decades, the emotional lexicon has continued to be a subject of interest among psycholinguistic researchers. More recently, this interest has expanded to the ways in which emotion words are cognitively processed in both single and dual language learners. The current chapter will examine research regarding emotional language processing both with...

The relationship between executive functions (EF) and bilingualism has dominated debate in the field. This debate was characterised by optimism for a bilingual advantage until the last decade, when a steady stream of articles reported failure to find a consistently positive effect for bilingualism. In addition to addressing concerns about study qua...

Human behavior is often guided by the development and use of language as a means of communication and as a way to represent thoughts and knowledge. Notions of linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis indicate that language plays a role in structuring the worldview and perceptions of individuals. The current work will explore how those p...

This study compared the achievement emotions of Egyptian undergraduates in online versus in-person classes. A sample of 147 students completed an adapted version of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire concerning class-related matters. Additionally, 50 students completed written interviews regarding their emotional reactions. The results showed t...

Are there effective mechanisms that can be used to remember someone's name? The production effect is a phenomenon that exemplifies memory's robust benefit for studied words or phrases that have been spoken out loud, as opposed to only hearing or seeing them. However, this robust effect has not yet been identified for face-name pairings. The present...

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study‐test trials with 7‐item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments 1 and 2) and ne...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions In this study, we examined memory performance in a bilingual population, in an effort to compare depth of processing and complexity across first and second languages. Design/methodology/approach Complexity was investigated with a pleasantness rating task and an elaborative encoding, scenario-based rat...

Objective Earlier studies on message framing in the health sector have often focused on the effectiveness of framing in terms of behaviour change and decision making. Much less attention has been paid to the influence of message framing on the emotional responses of the recipients. This neglected aspect is extremely important particularly at times...

Bilingual populations provide a rich source of information processing knowledge that has been used to shape our understanding of language learning, understanding, and general communication. However, much of the present literature focusing on bilingual individuals is faced with sample specificities that can limit generalizability. It is well acknowl...

S.A. Mednick (1962) proposed a theory of creativity suggesting that highly creative individuals can pro- duce more word associations to a stimulus than less creative individuals. Numerous studies have supported this theory using the Remote Associates Test (RAT) as the measure of creativity. Additionally, some studies have suggested that high-freque...

The survival processing advantage is a robust mnemonic device in which information processed for its relevance to one’s survival is subsequently better remembered. Research indicates that elaborative processing may be a key component underlying this memory effect, and that this mechanism resembles divergent thinking, whereby words with a greater nu...

Objective. The current study aims at investigating if the morphological structure of the first language (L1) equivalents affects the processing of second language (L2) words. Materials & Methods. To this end, 400 Arabic-English bilinguals of two levels of language proficiency completed a free recall task and a discrete word association task in th...

The current study aims at investigating if the morphological structure of the first language (L1) equivalents affects the processing of second language (L2) words. Materials & Methods. To this end, 400 Arabic-English bilinguals of two levels of language proficiency completed a free recall task and a discrete word association task in their L2. The s...

Definition: Memory for others is enhanced by details violating one’s social expectations.

The current study examined animacy and paired-associate learning through a survival-processing paradigm (Nairne et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263-273, 2007; Schwartz & Brothers, 2014). English-speaking monolingual participants were asked to learn a set of new word translations to improve their...

The past decade has produced great strides in understanding the functional aspects of human cognition. One prolific area of research asserts that memory is optimized when information is processed for its fitness, or “survival relevance” (see, e.g., Nairne et al., J Exp Psychol 33:263–273, 2007). Early work conducted in this area used a simple recal...

The current study examines the influence of word type (i.e., emotion-label vs. emotion-laden) and valence (i.e., positive vs. negative vs. neutral) on the processing of emotion words among bilinguals. To this end, three groups of Arabic-English bilinguals (n=120 per group) completed the tasks of free recall, ratings for concreteness, imageability a...

Extensive research has examined the influence of client–therapist racial, ethnic, or cultural match on outcomes in therapy. Further, many narrative reviews have summarized the literature in this area, and several meta-analytic reviews have examined the strength of the influence of client–therapist match. The present narrative review builds on previ...

Robust support has been found for a survival processing effect on memory when information is encoded for its fitness relevance (Nairne et al. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 33:263–273, 2007). However, support for this effect has been limited to forms of memory that require intentional, explicit retrieval processes. Thus far, the literature has failed...

There is a growing body of evidence that words denoting emotions constitute a distinct semantic and conceptual category. Here we will present core evaluation data (valence, arousal, dominance) from a project dedicated to mapping the basic emotion concepts in English and in Polish and cataloguing words denoting them. For this project we collected al...

Linguistic research on bilinguals has sometimes focused on either first vs. second acquired language or dominant vs. non-dominant language despite situations in which the dominant and first language are no longer the same. Many bilinguals in the U.S. and other countries experience a change in language dominance from a home language to a majority la...

Before information can be used in a meaningful way, it must first be attended to within the perceiver's environment. Once information is attended to, how it is interpreted by the individual based on current goals, drives, and motives determines how it is perceived. Humans have an automatic tendency to focus their cognitive resources on stimuli that...

This chapter explores various aspects and assumptions of models of bilingual language processing and organization. A brief overview of theoretical language models is provided to include a discussion of the distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism, as well as models of connectionism, hierarchical structures, and a recently proposed m...

This chapter explores the ways in which emotion processing, in the form of words, images, and other stimuli, differs across a bilingual's two languages. Findings from the behavioural, physiological, neuroimaging, and clinical literatures support the notion of a bilingual's first language (L1) garnering emotion processing advantages and preferences....

While recent research has explored the effect that positive and negative emotion words (e.g., happy or sad) have on the eye-movement record during reading, the current study examined the effect of positive and negative emotion-laden words (e.g., birthday or funeral) on eye movements. Emotion-laden words do not express a state of mind but have emoti...

The perceptual interference effect proposes that individuals demonstrate an unexpected boost in memory for words presented in a perceptually disfluent format. However, individuals are inaccurate at judging their own learning of the words (Besken & Mulligan, 2013; Sungkhasettee et al., 2011). A series of experiments was conducted to investigate...

Individuals’ behavior can be influenced by cues in their surroundings (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). In the current study, behavioral priming was applied to examine if exposing individuals to subliminally presented food items would later influence their behavior when selecting a snack and completing cloze sentences. Phase I of this experiment...

Research focused on the cognitive processes surrounding bilingual language representation has revealed the important role that translation ambiguity plays in how languages are stored in memory (Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). In addition, translation of emotionally related information has been shown to be challenging because a direct translation does not...

Empirical evidence has recently been provided for the distinctiveness of emotion words as compared to abstract and concrete words for monolinguals, calling for a reconsideration of the relation between emotion and language. The present study investigates whether the distinctiveness of emotion words among monolinguals holds for foreign language lear...

The survival processing effect is the finding that items processed for their survival relevance are remembered better than those processed using other elaborative types of encoding strategies. This effect has been attributed to more elaborative encoding processes engendered by the survival scenario; however, there are various limitations with previ...

While the survival processing effect of memory has been robustly found within tasks of explicit (i.e., intentional) memory, it has yet to be obtained using tasks measuring implicit (i.e., automatic) memory. The present study sought to investigate this mnemonic device within implicit memory using a recognition task.

Research focused on the study of emotion, specifically how it is mentally represented in the human memory system, is of great importance within the study of cognition. The current chapter will examine the factors that make emotion words unique, as compared to other word types (e.g., concrete and abstract words) that have traditionally been of inter...

Decades of cross‐cultural research have revealed an interesting and important relationship between culture and emotion. The effects of culture are far‐reaching, with emotion sensitivity and recognition affected by cultural familiarity, a type of ingroup advantage. This entry describes cross‐cultural similarities and differences with regard to emoti...

In recent decades, researchers have noted consistent costs in lexical access among bilingual participants. Using a variety of fluency measures, but primarily picture-naming with switching, bilinguals are often outperformed by their monolingual peers. Bilingual deficits on fluency measures are observed across the lifespan, though recent findings wou...

Recent research at the intersection between multicultural psychology and rehabilitation psychology has acknowledged the linguistic and cultural factors affecting therapeutic outcomes. For Hispanic patients, their growing population, limited access to adequate healthcare, and numerous risk factors present unique challenges to their therapists. Hispa...

The use of emotion in language is a key element of human interactions and a rich area for cognitive research. The present study examined reactions to words of five types: positive emotion (e.g., happiness), negative emotion (e.g., hatred), positive emotion-laden (e.g., blessing), negative emotion-laden (e.g., prison), and neutral (e.g., chance). Wo...

This study explores the hypothesis that language of testing and mood states can influence creativity in bilinguals. Arabic–English bilingual speakers were induced into positive or negative mood states using film clips and recall-of-events procedures. Then, participants’ creativity was assessed with the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. Particip...

Historically, the manner in which translation ambiguity and emotional content are represented in bilingual memory have often been ignored in many theoretical and empirical investigations, resulting in these linguistic factors related to bilingualism being absent from even the most promising models of bilingual memory representation. However, in rec...

Recent findings from the memory literature indicate that the human memory system may prioritize survival-relevant information, relative to other types of information. The original work led by Nairne and colleagues (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007) suggested that survival processing may be a more efficient...

Reviews the book, The Psychology of Language: An Integrated Approach by David Ludden (see record 2015-27919-000 ). This is a textbook that many instructors who are teaching an introductory psycholinguistics course will find of considerable interest. The contents of the textbook and the author’s prose make it clear that he is writing to an audience...

This chapter examines the use of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) as a research method for studying reading and attention in bilinguals. Theoretical background and methodological considerations are provided for the most common ways in which RSVP is used: lexical processing, repetition blindness (RB), the attentional blink (AB), and executive...

The current chapter introduces the reader to the vision and the contents of the present volume—Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research. The focus is on traditional as well as newly developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading. Findings are critically reviewed stemming from the well-known behavioral approaches to...

The collected essays in this volume present an overview and state-of-the-field of traditional and recently developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading comprehension. It critically reviews and examines major findings from classical behavioral approaches such as the visual moving window, rapid-serial visual presentation (RSV...

This study was designed to investigate the impact of survival processing with a novel task for this paradigm: the Stroop color-naming task. As the literature is mixed with regard to task generalizability, with survival processing promoting better memory for words, but not better memory for faces or paired associates, these types of task investigati...

A primed lexical decision task (lot) was used to determine whether emotion (e.g., love, fear) and emotion-laden (e.g., puppy, hospital) word processing differs, both explicitly and implicitly. Previous experiments have investigated how emotion word processing differs from both abstract and concrete word processing (Altarriba&Bauer, 2004; Altarriba,...

As the division between emotion and emotion-laden words has been viewed as controversial by, for example, Kousta and colleagues, the current study attempted a replication and extension of findings previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In their findings, Kazanas and Altarriba reported significant differences in response times (RTs) and prim...

While much has been written regarding the mental representation of con- crete and abstract concepts, less is known about how the mind represents, stores, and processes emotional language both within and between lan- guages (see e.g., Altarriba & Bauer, 2004). Words that label emotions (e.g., happy, sad, scared) and words that have an emotional comp...

Color has the ability to influence a variety of human behaviors, such as object recognition, the identification of facial expressions, and the ability to categorize stimuli as positive or negative. Researchers have started to examine the relationship between emotional words and colors, and the findings have revealed that brightness is often associa...

The present study investigated the conditions under which multitasking impairs reading comprehension. Participants read prose passages (the primary task), some of which required them to perform a secondary task. In Experiment 1, we compared two different types of secondary tasks (answering trivia questions and solving math problems). Reading compre...

Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the function of memory in our evolutionary history. According to Nairne and colleagues (e.g., Nairne, Pandeirada, and Thompson, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada, 2007), the best mnemonic strategy for learning lists of unrelated words may be one that addresses the same problems that our Pleistoce...

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in Int J Billing 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in Am J Psychol, in press), and rapid serial visual processing (Knickerbocker and Altarriba i...

Research with multilinguals has highlighted the general memory advantages of knowing more than one language. For example, Schroeder and Marian have cited better executive functioning in bilinguals than monolinguals, and research in the medical field has found a buffering effect of multilingualism on memory loss in the elderly. Other research has em...

Research on the representation of emotion in human memory has focused on the ways in which words that label an emotion (e.g., love, joy) or represent emotional components (e.g., death, butterfly) are learned, stored, and retrieved from memory. The current work reviews the ways in which these types of words have been distinguished from concrete and...

By administering Simon, Simon switching, and operation-span working memory tasks to Cantonese-English bilingual children who varied in their first-language (L1, Cantonese) and second-language (L2, English) proficiencies, as quantified by standardized vocabulary test performance, the current study examined the effects of L1 and L2 proficiency on att...

Recently, Scott, O'Donnell and Sereno reported that words of high valence and arousal are processed with greater ease than neutral words during sentence reading. However, this study unsystematically intermixed emotion (label a state of mind, e.g., terrified or happy) and emotion-laden words (refer to a concept that is associated with an emotional s...

Language is a primary vehicle through which we communicate our beliefs, perceptions and knowledge of the world, and thoughts and information about ourselves. One of the types of information that we readily communicate involves reports of our feelings and emotions. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014. All rights are reserved.

Many examples exist in real-world settings that highlight the importance of examining the veracity of recalled memories. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014. All rights are reserved.

Cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists alike will likely attest to the fact that the bulk of research over many decades in these fields has been devoted to the understanding of human memory. We know that we are who we are, because of our memories, and thus, it is one of the most important functions of the mind that one can ponder, researc...

Foundations of Bilingual Memory provides a valuable update to the field of bilingual memory and offers a new psychological perspective on how the bilingual mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information. This volume emphasizes theoretical issues, such as classic memory approaches, Compound-Coordinate Bilingualism, Bilingual Dual Coding Theory, and...

It is known that when bilinguals translate words from one language into another, situations arise in which there are no direct translations across languages, or in which multiple translations of the word exist (i.e., word ambiguity). Previous research has revealed that the number of translations a word has across languages influences processing of...

This paper represents a portion of a comprehensive design cognition study focused on the embodiment of concepts with varying emotional content (i.e. concrete, abstract and emotional) into product form. It is aimed at identifying differences in terms of cognitive processing among these three states during the initial part of the design process and d...

The repetition blindness effect (RB; Kanwisher, 1987) is the finding that under certain conditions, repeated words are recalled more poorly than unrepeated words. Repetition blindness is found when using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, where stimuli are briefly and sequentially presented (e.g., 75–125 ms). When comparing RB wi...

Emotional states derived from stimuli such as visual objects, scenes, and films, linguistic input such as words and phrases, and other inputs such as music and humor have been examined over many decades in an attempt to understand how feelings are aroused and, in turn, how they influence behavior. From early introspectionists to modern-day social,...

The relationship between memory and language and the topic of bilingualism are important areas of research in both psychology and linguistics and are grounded in cognitive and linguistic paradigms, theories and experimentation. This volume provides an integrated theoretical/real-world approach to second language learning, use and processing from a...

The chapter describes how bilinguals use language to express their emotions, how language is used to code past experiences, and how language-specific and culture-specific techniques can be used to enhance the therapeutic process for bilinguals. It discusses some of the problems and benefits of using interpreters in therapy, and offers suggestions f...

The tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT) is a universal phenomenon in which a speaker cannot fully produce a word that he or she believes will eventually be recalled and could easily be recognized. The purpose of the current experiment is to determine how variables such as word concreteness and word frequency influence TOT rates. Participants were sh...

By administering a Stroop task to college-student bilinguals varied in self-rated first- (L1) and second-language (L2) proficiency, the current study examined the effects of L1 and L2 proficiencies on selective attention performance. We conducted ex-Gaussian analyses to capture the modal and positive-tail components of participants' reaction time d...