Can Language Affect the Way We Feel?

Can language affect the way we experience emotions? More than ever, researchers are finding that language not only affects the way we communicate, but also the way that we think (see my previous post) and as has recently been discovered, the way that we experience emotions. This may come as no surprise to those who have grown up in a bilingual household, or are bilingual themselves. As is sometimes depicted in movies and TV shows, although it may be exaggerated, bilingual speakers sometimes switch between languages when expressing or feeling different emotions (think Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky).
Recently, Stephen Chen and Qing Zhou, psychological scientists in the United States, published an article about the emotional aspect of “code-switching”, which is the linguistic term for using multiple languages in conversation, in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. According to these researchers, the languages used by parents to talk about and express different emotions can affect the way that their children experience emotions. For example, because it is not common to directly express emotions in Finnish, a parent who speaks both English and Finnish may use English to share feelings of love with children. In turn, these children would come to understand that when their parents speak in English, they are more likely to be expressing emotions.