The impact of using a non-native language in coaching or counseling: How are emotions, empathy, and trust affected?

Acquisition of a mother tongue occurs in emotionally rich and diverse contexts while foreign languages are typically acquired in academic environments, resulting in non-identical emotional reactivity in response to native and foreign languages. Sometimes we might even experience an emotional distance when engaged in conversation in a foreign language. If you hear the word 'you' in your native language, it may carry a much deeper emotional resonance than when you hear it in a second language. Deeper emotion processing can happen unconsciously: some evidence shows that bilingual speakers might process word meaning similarly in their both languages, but pupil dilation (which is a non-voluntary response to emotional content) occurs stronger for the first than the second language. 

Many of us who have learned a foreign language or languages after early childhood, might have an accent. Quite often even bilingual or proficient speakers have an accent in one or some of their languages. Research suggests that accented speech can influence our perception of trustworthiness: we tend to trust information more when it is easier to process, and foreign-accented speech can be more challenging to understand. Training on cross-cultural awareness and explicit linguistic instruction on comprehension of foreign-accented speech have, however, shown to increase understanding and also empathy for speakers with a foreign accent.

Do you notice emotional distancing when using your non-native language?  Would you be open to participating in a coaching session with a coach who has a foreign accent? Which languages do you feel emotionally connected to?

Reference and further reading:

Ivaz, L., Costa, A., & Duñabeitia, J. A. (2016). The emotional impact of being myself: Emotions and foreign-language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(3), 489.

Iacozza, S., Costa, A., & Duñabeitia, J. A. (2017). What do your eyes reveal about your foreign language? Reading emotional sentences in a native and foreign language. PloS one, 12(10).

Derwing, T. M., Rossiter, M. J., & Munro, M. J. (2002). Teaching native speakers to listen to foreign-accented speech. Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 23(4), 245-259.