Lost in translation. Since the work of Sigmund Freud, psychologists have known that early experiences play an important role in adult emotional responses. Now a team of researchers led by Catherine Harris, a CAS associate professor of psychology, has found that people who are bilingual have a stronger emotional response to harsh words spoken in their native tongue than they do to the same words spoken in a language learned later on.

The research team, which also includes Jean Berko Gleason, a CAS psychology professor, and Ayse Ayçiçegi, an assistant professor of psychology at Istanbul University in Turkey, studied 32 fluent English-speakers who had grown up speaking Turkish, but had learned English after age 12. The researchers measured participants’ emotional responses to taboo words and childhood reprimands by recording galvanic skin response (GSR), a change in the electrical conductance of the skin related to changes in the sympathetic nervous system (a technology similar to that used in some lie detectors).

They found that both spoken and written reprimands in Turkish elicited significantly greater GSR levels than did the same words in English. Reactions to spoken taboo words were stronger in the participants’ first language, but the difference was not as significant for the same words presented in written format.

“The implications of this research for the classroom and bilingual education are tremendous,” says Harris. “In the past decade, research has shown emotion to be central to memory, decision-making, and learning. If you can’t learn well if the material hasn’t engaged you on an emotional level, consider what it means when the material is being delivered in a second language. Lessons that would normally serve as bridges to learning will seem boring, irrelevant, and disconnected from other knowledge.”

Harris is currently extending this paradigm to speakers of Mandarin and Spanish, groups who may have different attitudes towards emotion words and emotional expression.

The research was published in the December 2003 issue of the journal Applied Psycholinguistics.

Leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Superman was able to effectively fight crime in some measure because he didn’t have to take the stairs. In an analogous way, Thomas Keyes and John Straub, CAS chemistry professors, and Steven Homer, a CAS computer science professor, are building computational tools that allow them to skip the small steps in simulating such complex processes as how proteins fold and how liquids form glasses.

The team’s method is described by Keyes as a potential-energy landscape approach to mapping molecular movement. The potential energy in such a process — the energy involved in the interaction of the molecules — depends on how the molecules are arranged. The researchers liken it to mountainous terrain, where molecules spend most of the time in the valleys, moving infrequently over the mountains. Conventional simulations eat up computational time modeling systems as they wander through the valleys. Keyes and his team propose to first map the landscape, then move the systems through a series of steps where they leap from pinnacle to pinnacle.

“Simulating these processes using conventional methods requires more steps than the national debt in pennies,” says Keyes, “which means that the most important problems cannot be studied by even the largest supercomputers. However, most of the steps do not contribute to the important changes, so simulating them all is a great waste of computational time. Our goal is to focus on points of large-scale molecular motion and to build algorithms that will just make those big moves.”

The computational simulations will shed light on important systems such as how proteins fold into the active forms required by biological processes and on how liquids cooled quickly to below their normal freezing point form glasses that are used in numerous products, including transformer coils and fiber-optic cable.

This work is funded by a three-year, nearly half a million dollar grant from the Information Technology Research Program of the National Science Foundation.