Language Changes Medical Judgments and Beliefs

Elucidating the emotional persona in the Romanian university students' academic discourse: a corpus-based exploration

Introduction

Despite growing global interest in the emotional dimensions of academic writing, Romanian academic discourse remains underexplored, particularly in multilingual contexts. This study addresses this gap by analyzing a bilingual corpus of texts written in Romanian (L1) and English (L2) across various disciplines and genres. It aims to uncover emotional dimensions conveyed through linguistic markers, exploring how language, culture, and academic context shape students' writing styles. Romania's historical and social emphasis on formality, hierarchy, and indirectness in communication serves as a backdrop for examining these dynamics.

Method

A corpus-based approach was adopted, utilizing the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015) tool to analyze linguistic and emotional markers. The bilingual ROGER corpus, containing texts from nine Romanian universities spanning multiple disciplines and genres, served as the dataset. Advanced data analysis techniques included supervised machine learning for language classification, network analysis to explore interactions among linguistic features, and cluster analysis to detect discipline- and genre-specific linguistic patterns.

Results

The findings reveal distinct emotional patterns between Romanian and English academic writing. Romanian texts exhibit a higher degree of formality and indirectness, while English texts reflect greater assertiveness and personal engagement. Additionally, the Romanian corpus demonstrates less linguistic cohesion and a broader range of writing styles. Genre- and discipline-specific trends also emerge, with English coursework and analytical writing, predominantly from social sciences, displaying more personal and emotional expression than research-focused texts. In contrast, the Romanian corpus, characterized by a third cluster, presents less clear-cut patterns: humanities texts span both emotionally expressive and neutral tones, while research and academic papers frequently exhibit an achievement-oriented or entrepreneurial style, though a significant subset also reflects a highly disengaged profile.

Discussion

By integrating machine learning, network analysis, and automatic language analysis, this study offers a novel perspective on how language, genre, and discipline-specific conventions shape emotional expression in academic writing. The results suggest that the Romanian students' emotional personas in academic writing are influenced by all these factors, potentially shaped by the cultural norms of the second language, providing insights for teaching academic writing in multilingual settings.

Evaluating the effectiveness of a school-based mental health literacy intervention from a comprehensive demographic and social-cognitive perspective

Childhood and adolescence are a critical period for the onset of mental and neurodevelopmental disorders and a time when many can be first identified. Research demonstrates that mental health literacy applied in school settings may be an effective approach to address these challenges. In contrast to many existing studies conducted in multicultural and multilingual settings that treated subjects' language as a demographic feature, the present study recognizes English proficiency as a social-cognitive factor and views the school-based mental health literacy (MHL) intervention as a learning process. The present study aimed to assess the effectiveness of school-based mental health literacy intervention and explore how ethnicity and English proficiency as a social-cognitive factor, as a modified, rather than a fixed variable, impacted the intervention outcomes. Grade 9 students (n = 240) from schools in West Canada with diverse social/cultural background received the intervention in the classroom delivered by trained teachers and completed the pre-test and post-test over a 6-month period. The intervention was effective in improving knowledge and help-seeking attitudes among all students. Non-Chinese and native English-speaking students performed the best on all outcomes. Gender demonstrated an association with changes in stigma, stress and wellbeing. English proficiency was linked to knowledge acquisition, while ethnicity was connected to changes of attitude-related outcomes. These findings deepened our understanding of how demographic and social-cognitive factors underlie changes in mental health literacy outcomes, which will facilitate the development of mental health literacy interventions for diverse student populations.

Can Language Influence Health Decisions? The Role of Foreign Language and Grammatical Structure

The language used to present an argument has long been argued to influence people's reaction to that argument. This study examined how language and grammatical structure influenced response to health-related dilemmas. We investigated whether medical students' willingness to receive a medical treatment or to take an action (regarding advancing one's own health or other people's health) was influenced by the language (first versus foreign) and the grammatical structures (modifiers and quantifiers) used. Saudi medical students (N = 368) read health-related dilemmas using different adverbial modifiers and quantifiers in Arabic or in English. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Arabic with high certainty (i.e., very-modifier and all-quantifier), Arabic with low certainty (no very-modifier and some-quantifier), English with high certainty, and English with low certainty. The results showed that the participants were susceptible to a foreign language effect, but not to a grammatical structure effect. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to how different health-scenarios may affect decision making for health professionals.

How providing public COVID-19 mitigation instructions in a foreign language can increase people's sense of control

Processing information in a learned foreign language can alter one's judgment or cognitive evaluation of stimuli. Documented consequences include a reduction in perceived negativity and perceived severity of crime or diseases. The global COVID-19 pandemic has offered a unique opportunity to investigate this phenomenon in a real-life public health communication context. The aim of this study is to investigate how foreign language processing influences people's reaction towards freedom-restrictive messages. In our experimental study (N = 605), we presented participants with pandemic mitigation instructions in their native language versus a learned foreign language and assessed their perceived sense of control, cognitive evaluation of the instructions, and the intention to adhere to them. The results indicated that the use of a foreign language influenced people's perceived sense of control in a way that might intuitively be surprising: foreign language enhanced sense of control. This positively influenced the cognitive evaluation of the instructions' effectiveness and the intention to comply with them. The present research demonstrates that foreign language processing influences individuals' responses to specific, real-life instructions. Our results provide important contributions to the literature on foreign language effects and public communication and enable practitioners to more accurately predict recipient responses to global crisis communications.

Using a Foreign Language Changes Medical Judgments of Preventative Care

Every day, multilinguals around the world make important healthcare decisions while using a foreign language. The present study examined how the use of a native vs. non-native language shapes evaluations and decisions about preventative care. Bilinguals were randomly assigned to evaluate a series of medical scenarios in either their native or non-native language. Each scenario described potential adverse effects of a medical condition and a preventative treatment, as well as the population risk of disease- or treatment-related complications. Participants judged the perceived negativity and likelihood of experiencing adverse effects and indicated how willing they would be to accept the preventative treatment. We found that bilinguals using a foreign language perceived disease symptoms and treatment side effects to be less negative than those using their native tongue. Foreign language users were also more likely to account for the objective risks associated with medical conditions and treatments when making decisions about preventative care. We conclude that the use of a native vs. foreign language changes how people evaluate the consequences of accepting and declining preventative treatment, with potential implications for millions of providers and patients who routinely make medical choices in their non-native tongue.