Fear of the known: semantic generalisation of fear conditioning across languages in bilinguals.

While modern theories of emotion emphasize the role of higher-order cognitive processes such as semantics in human emotion, much research into emotional learning has ignored the potential contributions of such processes. This study aimed to determine whether emotional learning affects semantic representations of words independent of perceptual features by assessing whether fear conditioning to a neutral word generalises across languages in bilingual participants. Two sessions differing according to the reinforced language were performed by English-Spanish bilinguals. In each session, a neutral word was reinforced by an electrical shock whereas its equivalent in the other language was never paired with shock. Across two sessions within our sample, we found replicable evidence that fear conditioning consistently transferred to the non-reinforced language as measured by both self-reported fear and electrodermal activity, irrespective of the conditioned language. Our findings extend knowledge about the role of semantic similarity in fear generalisation and highlight the importance of higher-order cognitive processes in human emotions.