Over the past few decades, research on bilingualism and biculturalism has received unprecedented attention in psychology literature, as a consequence of the rapid growth in immigration and extensive globalization. While research on bilingualism has already attained a remarkable level of recognition, the amount of work dedicated to the relatively new field of biculturalism is also on the rise. One core question in the study of bilingualism and biculturalism is whether the two constructs are necessarily coextensive. Soffieti (1960) asserted that it is not always the case. People can be bilingual but not bicultural, such as inhabitants of countries with lingua franca’s, or foreign language learners who then use their second language regularly. Likewise, people can be bicultural but not bilingual, such as immigrants who move to a different country where the same language is used, or members of a minority group who no longer speak their heritage language while retaining other aspects of their culture. However, recent research tends to view bilingualism as an essential property of being bicultural (Luna, Ringberg, & Peracchio, 2008). Though the development of bilingualism and biculturalism may occur at different points of an individual’s life, the two happen simultaneously in most cases (LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). In this chapter, we will follow this line of reasoning to encompass both bilingual and bicultural contexts.
Bilingualism and biculturalism can affect a wide range of outcomes, such as personal adjustment in psychological and emotional well-being, and sociocultural adjustment in academic achievement. In the following sections, we first summarize definitions of bilingualism and biculturalism as well as the criteria used for these definitions and constructs related to adjustment in bilingual and bicultural contexts. Then we review empirical studies examining the impact of personality on adjustment in bilingual and bicultural contexts. Finally, we explicate the mechanisms underlying language effects on personality and discuss the implications for the malleability of personality as influenced by language and culture.
To fully investigate the impacts of bilingualism and biculturalism on personality and adjustment and the language effects on the measurement of personality, the first step is to define the scope of the terms “bilingualism” and “biculturalism.” Thus far, there is hardly consensus in linguistics and related fields regarding the characteristic features of a bilingual. Likewise, an agreed-upon conceptualization for biculturalism is yet to be established.
Definitions of bilingualism in the literature vary across a very broad spectrum, sprawling from narrow definitions such as the possession of “native-like control of two languages” (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 56), as in professional interpreters, to broader definitions, such as the ability to effectively communicate (i.e., understand and produce messages) in more than one language (Titone, 1996) and to function in each language according to given needs (Grosjean, 1989), as in migrant workers who are proficient in speaking and listening to the host language but cannot read or write. Others defined bilingualism from somewhat qualitatively distinct angles, in which a bilingual refers to an individual who is “taken to be one of themselves by the members of two different linguistic communities” (Thiery, 1978, p. 146), or who can master a second language while complying with the unique concepts and structures of that language, instead of simply paraphrasing his or her first language (Titone, 1972). In some early bilingual studies, a child’s degree of bilingualism could be classified into three categories in terms of the place of birth of his or her parents (Brunner, 1929), whether it was local/local, local/foreign, or foreign/foreign, while in other studies, bilingualism was assessed through family names or places of residence (Darcy, 1953). There are two commonly used categories of bilingualism in research. One is based on an individual’s fluency and use of the languages and the other depends on the context in which the second language is acquired.
Based on the individuals’ fluency and use of their two languages, bilingualism can also be divided into additive and subtractive bilingualism (Lambert, 1978; Lambert & Taylor, 1981), corresponding to elite and folk bilingualism, respectively (Fishman, 1977; Paulston, 1975, 1980). Additive bilinguals learn their second language in addition to their first language, resulting in balanced bilingualism, whereas subtractive bilinguals gradually replace their first language with the second language as they enter schools, in which a highly prestigious, socially powerful and dominant language like English emerges as the exclusive language. Contrary to popular belief, many bilinguals are dominant in one language rather than balanced, as affected by the distribution of the languages across domains of life, as well as language use and fluency. To depict a bilingual in terms of language use and language fluency, Grosjean (2010) created a grid system to represent an individual’s extent of bilingualism. Four language competencies, including speaking, listening, writing, and reading, together with the language history of the bilingual, can also be further delineated by separate grids.
Depending on the context in which their second language is acquired, individuals can also be categorized into coordinate bilinguals and compound bilinguals (Ervin & Osgood, 1954; Weinrich, 1953). Coordinate bilinguals learn and use their first and second languages in separate and distinct cultural environments, such as immigrants who learn the host language after they arrive in the receiving society. In contrast, compound bilinguals acquire their two languages in the same cultural environment, such as individuals who learn a second language in local schools while residing in their mother-tongue culture. Traditionally, coordinate bilinguals were sampled in most early bilingual studies, while a growing body of studies have started to place their focus on compound bilinguals.
Definitions of biculturalism can range from general features such as demographic characteristics to psychologically specific conceptualizations such as cultural identifications or orientations (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2007). Broadly speaking, immigrants, refugees, sojourners, indigenous inhabitants, ethnic minorities, people in interethnic relationships, individuals with mixed-ethnicity, and so forth can all be termed as biculturals (Berry, 2003; Padilla, 1994). From a psychological perspective, there is more than one definition of biculturalism as well. Loosely defined, individuals can claim their cultural dualism simply by self-label or group self-categorization (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2007). On the other hand, a more stringent definition of biculturalism includes exposure to and internalization of two cultures (Benet-Martínez, Leu, Lee, & Morris, 2002), synthesis of two cultural norms into one behavioral repertoire (Rotheram-Borus, 1993), or the ability to switch between cultural schemas, norms, and behaviors when triggered by cultural cues (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000). One undesirable consequence of the inconsistent definitions of biculturalism is the wide variations in sampling criteria in bicultural studies, which make comparisons across studies very difficult. For example, some criteria have been based on the participants’ length of living in each culture (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005; Benet-Martínez et al., 2002) and some have focused on participants’ identification with each culture (Chen, Benet-Martínez, & Bond, 2008; Chen, Benet-Martínez, Wu, Lam, & Bond, 2013), while other researchers have simply restricted their samples to bilingual university students in multicultural societies (Briley, Morris, & Simonson, 2005; Hong et al., 2000). Given its complex nature, the categorization of biculturalism is even more complicated than that of bilingualism, including various bicultural concepts.
In the same vein as for bilingualism, the dichotomy between fluency and use, referring to cultural competence or knowledge versus interacting with two or more cultures, also applies to biculturalism. Grosjean (1983, 2008) identified biculturals as those who participate in the life of two or more cultures; adapt their attitudes, behaviors, values, and languages to these cultures; and combine and contribute to aspects of their respective cultures. Some researchers stress fluency equivalence, which requires biculturals to possess two distinct and complete sets of knowledge structures, one for each culture (Luna et al., 2008), though this is rarely the case in real life. Similar to the phenomenon of “language dominance” in which one language is more important for bilinguals than the other, “culture dominance” also occurs among biculturals as one culture usually plays a bigger part than the other in the life of biculturals.
According to LaFromboise and colleagues (1993), bicultural efficacy refers to the belief that one can live effectively and satisfyingly within two groups, without compromising one’s sense of cultural identity. An alternative term, “bicultural self-efficacy,” was coined by David, Okazaki, and Saw (2009) to describe the perceived ability that one can function competently in two cultures. David and colleagues’ (2009) research reveals that high-perceived bicultural self-efficacy is related to better life satisfaction and lower levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. The results support that bicultural self-efficacy is beneficial to psychological adjustment among biculturals.
Acculturation refers to the process of modification of different aspects of self-identity to accommodate information about and experiences within the new culture, involving changes in many domains such as attitudes, behaviors, values, and sense of cultural identity (Ryder, Alden, & Paulhus, 2000). Various constructs have been proposed by researchers to describe biculturals’ acculturation history. Unidimensional and bidimensional models comprise two major representations of the acculturation process. First detailed by Gordon (1964), the unidimensional approach places individuals on a continuum of identities ranging from exclusively heritage to exclusively host culture. The bidimensional approach, on the other hand, argues that there are two underlying dimensions of acculturation, in which both heritage and host cultural identities are free to vary independently (Berry, 1980). Although the unidimensional model seems to be more parsimonious (Flannery, 1998), the bidimensional model is now more widely accepted, as it constitutes a broader and more valid framework for understanding acculturation as a complex and multifaceted process. For example, the seminal work of Berry and colleagues (Berry & Sam, 1997) proposed a bidimensional model in which individuals are divided into four categories according to how they deal with two central issues: (a) the extent to which they are encouraged to maintain their heritage culture and (b) the extent to which they engage in the host culture. Four distinct acculturation positions are yielded: assimilation (involvement and identification with the host culture only), integration (involvement and identification with both cultures), separation (involvement and identification with the heritage culture only), and marginalization (involvement and identification with neither). Under this categorization, biculturals are those who adopt the “integration approach” by involving and identifying with both cultures.
Apart from the several major constructs mentioned above, there are still other conceptualizations of biculturalism. Some notable constructs in bicultural studies include identity consolidation by Schwartz (2006), in which identity is synthesized through a multidimensional process; blendedness and alternation by Phinney and Devich-Navarro (1997), in which the terms represent two patterns of biculturalism; identity compartmentalization by Baumeister, Shapiro, and Tice (1985), which depicts the context-specific or situation-specific nature of social identities; oppositional identities by Cross (1995), which differentiates defensive oppositional identity from alienated oppositional identity, with the former being an adaptive strategy for minorities to function in the larger society; cultural homelessness by Vivero and Jenkins (1999), which describes the unique experiences and feelings of multiculturals; optimal distinctiveness by Brewer (1991), in which social identity is regarded as a reconciliation of opposing needs of assimilation and differentiation from others; ethnocultural identity conflict by Ward (2008), which refers to the identity conflict individuals experience from acculturative demands; and social identity complexity by Roccas and Brewer (2002), which refers to the nature of the subjective representation of multiple ingroup identities. The number of constructs truly reflects the complexity of biculturalism and the difficulty of conducting bicultural studies. Therefore, for a more systematic and standardized study of biculturalism in the future, a universal definition of biculturalism is much needed.
Most second-culture acquisition models and acculturation strategies adopt a typology approach to categorize biculturals into different types. However, this approach only captures the identity and behavioral aspects of bicultural experience coexisting within the same type of biculturals (Huynh, Nguyen, & Benet-Martínez, 2011). By contrast, to capture individual differences in bicultural identity organization, Benet-Martínez and colleagues (2002) developed the theoretical construct of bicultural identity integration (BII) to assess the extent to which biculturals perceive their two cultural identities as compatible and integrated versus oppositional and difficult to integrate. Two psychometrically independent components are identified in the BII model: the affective component of cultural harmony versus conflict reflects the degree of harmony versus tension or clash felt between the two cultural orientations and the behavioral or performance-related component of cultural blendedness versus distance represents the degree of overlap versus dissociation or compartmentalization perceived between the two cultural orientations. Those high on BII are competent within two cultures and are capable of maintaining both cultural identities, whereas others with low BII find their two cultural identities conflicting and disparate.
The first study of BII used a pilot version of the Bicultural Identity Integration Scale (BIIS-P), a short vignette for biculturals to rate how much it describes their bicultural identity experiences (Benet-Martínez et al., 2002). However, the multistatement structure of the BIIS-P conflates the two components of BII, as participants are required to rate a single paragraph containing both elements (Huynh et al., 2011). Especially, individuals with both high BII and low BII as classified by the BIIS-P show a very similar adoption of Berry’s acculturation attitudes in integration, assimilation, and marginalization (Benet-Martínez et al., 2002). After years of development and validation, the measurement of BII has been greatly improved. The latest version, the Bicultural Identity Integration Scale-Version 2 (BIIS-2; Huynh, 2009) differentiates the harmony and blendedness components and is now a well-validated assessment tool in bicultural identity research.
Theoretically equivalent to the classification of bilinguals into coordinate and compound bilinguals, biculturals can also be exposed to and have internalized two cultures in separate, distinct cultural environments or in the same context. These two discrete types of bicultural experiences are identified as immigration-based and globalization-based acculturation, respectively (Chen et al., 2008). Immigration-based acculturation refers to the acculturation experience of minorities such as immigrants, refugees, and sojourners, who physically relocate themselves from one culture to another and acquire the languages, customs, values, and worldviews of the two cultures in different contexts. Globalization-based acculturation, on the other hand, refers to the acculturation experience of individuals who remain in their culture of origin but are exposed to the influences of other cultures due to globalization.
With developments in technology, ease of travel, and frequent cultural exchanges through media and the Internet, more individuals are exposed to and internalize more than one culture and become bicultural through the process of globalization (Benet-Martínez, 2012; Hong et al., 2000; Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2007). As physical relocation is not required, globalization-based acculturation can be experienced by local majority group members, who learn both local and global cultures simultaneously in the same context, as in a multicultural milieu, though local culture acquisition may still dominate (Chen, 2015). Most prior research on biculturals has focused on immigration-based biculturals, who have previously resided in their heritage culture and then relocated in a host culture (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013). Typically, these biculturals are immigrants and sojourners who are ethnic minorities in the receiving society. Participants’ biculturation experiences with the two cultures are quantified by their length of residence in each culture, usually with a minimum of 5 years (e.g., Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005; Benet-Martínez et al., 2002).
However, there are still some challenges for the immigration- versus globalization-based classification. Individuals’ acculturation experiences may be more complicated in real life, and the quality of acculturation cannot be directly measured. For example, immigrants living in ethnic enclaves may have minimum interactions with the receiving culture, despite living in both cultures for years. On the other hand, second- or third-generation immigrants who are born and raised in the receiving culture with limited experiences in the heritage culture may negotiate with bicultural identities. Though they do not personally relocate to another culture, these individuals are minority groups in an ethnically different society, and their bicultural experiences are probably due to family and home environment. Managing their identification with the heritage and receiving cultures is important to their survival and functioning in the receiving society, perhaps involuntarily.
By contrast, research on globalization-based biculturals encompasses individuals born and raised in a bicultural environment, such as members of majority groups in a multicultural society, who identify with two cultures and master two languages. They interface and interact with members of other cultures in their home environment and may voluntarily incorporate selective elements from other cultures into their self-identity. Hence, the definition of a bicultural can be extended from extensive experiences in two cultures to bicultural identifications coupled with bilingual competence, whether in the same or different cultures.
Research findings on the experiences of bilinguals and biculturals have been rather inconsistent. Early work tended to relate bilingualism and biculturalism to marginality and maladjustment. Over the past few decades, however, there is increasing evidence for the positive impacts of bilingualism and biculturalism on intellectual development and subjective well-being.
Recent research generally documents bilingual advantages across a variety of domains, including psychological well-being (Han & Huang, 2010), creativity (Leikin, 2013; Simonton, 2008), and problem solving (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010). In particular, bilingual advantages on cognition across age groups have been supported by conclusive and consistent results. For example, Poarch and Bialystok (2015) found that bilingual children had better executive function than their monolingual peers. As the system of executive function is the basis for multitasking, the findings suggest that bilingual experience may facilitate multitasking. In another study, an fMRI examination showed that older bilinguals have stronger brain activity and better white matter connections than their monolingual counterparts (Grady, Luk, Craik, & Bialystok, 2015), indicating that early language experience may influence brain networks in later life. The positive effect of bilingualism in enhancing executive control functions may have potentially important applications for delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease through mitigation of cognitive decline. Nevertheless, more research is needed to determine when the influence of bilingualism on the brain emerges and how it evolves over the lifespan.
In specific social contexts, however, the activation of both languages can be maladaptive. For example, Zhang, Morris, Cheng, and Yap (2013) demonstrated that heritage cultural images increase the social comfort of Chinese immigrants in the United States while at the same time impeding their English fluency, as the first language activated by the corresponding cultural cues interferes with their second language processing and undermines their performance in the receiving cultural context. Therefore, though bilingualism is generally beneficial, the possession of two languages can deplete an individual’s cognitive capacity in situations that require only one language.
Moreover, apart from the decade-old debate on positive versus negative impacts of mastering two languages, some interesting findings from recent cross-linguistic research may also shed light on future directions for bilingual studies. For example, the work by Lera Boroditsky and colleagues (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2011; Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011) revealed cross-linguistic differences in cognition involving time and causality. Therefore, one possible direction for future research is to understand the mechanisms through which languages construct the complex knowledge systems in bilinguals, especially the impacts on their personality and adjustment.
Personality characteristics have long been recognized as key determinants of psychological well-being. However, relatively few studies have examined the role of personality variables on psychological adjustment among bilinguals during their second language acquisition process. Throughout the bilingual literature, willingness to communicate in the second language (L2 WTC; MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément, & Noels, 1998) has been viewed as crucial to an individual’s second language communication and language proficiency (Oz, 2014) and is regarded as the immediate psychological precursor to the utilization of cognitive and affective capabilities and resources to cope with communication difficulties (Gallagher, 2012). In other words, L2 WTC is central to adjustment in a bilingual’s language learning experience. The relationship between L2 WTC and personality traits was examined in Oz’s (2014) study, in which the Big Five factors of extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience significantly predicted and set the psychological context for L2 WTC, in line with the findings of Pavičić-Takač and Požega (2012). The results obtained are understandable, as greater extraversion would set the groundwork for social interaction, thus greatly reducing language anxiety (MacIntyre & Noels, 1994); greater agreeableness would enhance pleasant contact with the second language community (Yashima, 2002), thus creating more opportunities for second language use; and greater openness to experience would strengthen an individual’s perceived competence in second language communication (MacIntyre & Charos, 1996), thus increasing their willingness to explore unfamiliar contexts to interact with others. Taken together, the Big Five factors of extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience are all beneficial to adjustment in bilingual contexts.
Psychological and sociocultural adjustment are the two major outcomes examined in bicultural studies. Psychological adjustment refers to psychological and emotional well-being, whereas sociocultural adjustment refers to behavioral competence (Ward & Kennedy, 1994). As in the studies of bilingualism mentioned earlier, findings regarding the impact of biculturalism on adjustment have also been mixed and inconclusive. While some have found positive links between biculturalism and adjustment (Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1980; Ward & Kennedy, 1994), others have found a non-significant association or a negative one (Burnam, Hough, Karno, Escobar, & Telles, 1987; Rotheram-Borus, 1990). Some researchers contend that biculturalism is beneficial to all aspects of life (Berry, 1997; Phinney, Horenczyk, Liebkind, & Vedder, 2001); others argue that biculturalism is maladaptive and a source of stress and isolation, as biculturals are always subject to the pressure to identify themselves with either culture (Rudmin, 2003; Vivero & Jenkins, 1999).
To reconcile the mixed findings, Nguyen and Benet-Martínez (2013) conducted a meta-analysis that covered 83 studies and 322 research articles. Results showed that orientation to two cultures is positively and strongly related to both psychological and sociocultural adjustment, even significantly stronger than orientation to a single culture, be it host or heritage culture. Their findings clearly indicate the benefits of biculturalism and nullify many early studies that portrayed biculturals as “marginal” and confused between two worlds. The biculturalism-adjustment link may be moderated by a host of factors, including measurement methods, adjustment domain, and sample characteristics. In particular, participation in one’s heritage and host cultures fosters biculturals’ efficacy and flexibility and elicits social support from both cultures, which may reduce acculturation stress and enhance adaptation in different cultural contexts (Benet-Martínez, Lee, & Leu, 2006; Gonzales, Knight, Birman, & Sirolli, 2004; Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, 2008; Szapocznik, Santisteban, Kurtines, Perez-Vidal, & Hervis, 1984).
However, the biculturalism-adjustment link is not necessarily unidirectional. While biculturalism enhances adjustment, adjustment also facilitates biculturalism. Better adjusted individuals are more resourceful in coping with maladjustment and more active in both cultures, and thus find it easier to become bicultural (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013). In the case of immigration-based acculturation, adjustment may also be influenced by various societal factors such as the host country’s attitude toward acculturation and individuals’ socioeconomic status (SES). Multicultural policies and nondiscriminatory acceptance may facilitate acculturation experience (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013), while individuals with higher SES are better adjusted and are more likely to be bicultural (Moyerman & Forman, 1992).
As in the studies of bilingualism, the role of personality variables in psychological adjustment in bicultural contexts has also received relatively little attention. In the handful of bicultural studies that have probed this interesting omission, findings have been consistent with those from typical personality studies in which personality traits of extraversion and conscientiousness are positively related to adjustment, whereas neuroticism is negatively related to well-being. As pointed out by Ward and Kennedy (1993), the effect of personality factors on biculturals’ psychological adjustment is so huge that the influence of acculturation becomes trivial.
For example, in Chen and colleagues’ study (2008), neuroticism was found to negatively predict psychological adjustment among two distinct types of biculturals: Mainland Chinese immigrants who permanently relocated themselves in Hong Kong and Filipino domestic helpers as sojourners who worked in a foreign culture for a limited period of time. In another study (Benet-Martínez & Karakitapoglu-Aygün, 2003), extraversion and conscientiousness were found to be positively associated with subjective well-being among first- and second-generation Asian immigrants, and European Americans as well.
The importance of the above personality variables to psychological adjustment among biculturals was further supported by a study on psychological adjustment among Mexican American university students (Ahadi & Puente-Díaz, 2011). The researchers found that extraversion was a significant predictor of positive affect and life satisfaction; neuroticism was associated with negative affect, distress from behavioral symptoms, and depression; and conscientiousness was positively related to psychological adjustment, especially positive affect. Their findings for extraversion are consistent with the results from a large-scale cross-cultural study, which revealed that extraversion is universally related to positive affect and life satisfaction (Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, & Shao, 2000). Furthermore, the results for extraversion and neuroticism were in line with the well-documented effects of these two personality dimensions on positive affect and negative affect, respectively (Costa & McCrae, 1980). In comparison with the other two personality variables, the positive effect of conscientiousness on psychological adjustment might not have received an equal amount of empirical support. Nevertheless, consistent results for conscientiousness on positive adjustment were obtained in some bicultural studies in which immigrants (Benet-Martínez & Karakitapoglu-Aygün, 2003) and sojourners (Ward, Leong, & Low, 2004) were sampled. Ahadi and Puente-Díaz (2011) suggested that particular facets of the higher-order factor of conscientiousness, such as competence, achievement striving, and self-discipline, might be the important contributors to psychological adjustment among biculturals. In other words, psychological adjustment can be regarded as the consequence of congruency between personality factors and the environment (Lucas & Diener, 2000).
To further explain the crucial role personality plays in psychological adjustment among biculturals, Ahadi and Puente-Díaz (2011) argued that personality can be considered as a proxy for stable characteristics. Stable characteristics, life circumstances, and intentional activity are well-recognized as the three major factors that contribute to an individual’s chronic well-being; stable characteristics are regarded as the single most important factor, explaining 50% of psychological well-being, while life circumstances and intentional activity explain the other 10% and 40%, respectively, according to Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade (2005). Following this line of reasoning, personality variables are, in fact, key determinants of biculturals’ psychological adjustment across their acculturation experience.
As Mead (1934/1962) put it, “A person learns a new language and, as we say, gets a new soul. He puts himself into the attitude of those that make use of that language. He cannot read its literature, cannot converse with those that belong to that community, without taking on its peculiar attitudes. He becomes in that sense a different individual.” (p. 283). From a social psychology viewpoint, using different languages activates corresponding psychological responses. Bilinguals alter components of their personality such as emotion, cognition, and behavior in response to linguistic cues. Research on cultural priming has documented language effects on values, self-concept, relationality, and cognition (Oyserman & Lee, 2008), although studies that directly address cross-language differences in personality among bilinguals have been scarce (Chen & Bond, 2010).
A good number of previous studies sampled coordinate bilinguals to investigate personality differences across linguistic contexts (e.g., Ervin, 1964; Hall, 1966). As coordinate bilinguals differ in the contexts in which they learn their two languages, the linguistic and social features they respond to in language manipulations may well differ (Ervin, 1961; Weinrich, 1953). As the two languages of coordinate bilinguals activate corresponding cultural scripts, the behavioral expressions associated with those cultural systems are thus readily elicited (Ervin & Osgood, 1954). However, a growing body of research has also documented language effects among compound bilinguals.
Early research tended to employ projective techniques to study language effects on personality. An experimental study by Ervin (1964) showed that adult French-English bilinguals told different stories when they were asked to relate what they saw on the same cards of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) on two different occasions, once in French and once in English. Significant language effects were found on verbal aggression to peers, withdrawal-anatomy, and achievement. TAT cards are pictures with ambiguous content, with which individuals project their personality characteristics including feelings, attitudes, and motives when they are describing the cards. Ervin (1964) attributed the findings to cultural shift, as each language is learned and engaged with different persons and in different contexts; a shift in language triggers a shift in social roles and emotional attitudes.
A few years later, Ervin employed another projective technique, a sentence completion task, to examine language differences in personality (Ervin-Tripp, 1968). Female Japanese-English bilinguals were asked to complete sentences with the same beginnings, one in Japanese and one in English. Results showed that endings in Japanese were more emotional, whereas endings in English were more abstract and cold. Both studies (Ervin, 1964; Ervin-Tripp, 1968) supported her conjecture that bilinguals have two personalities, and the use of each language may come to be associated with behavioral shift.
Other than projective techniques, questionnaire measures have also been used to investigate personality differences across languages. For example, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) was adopted by Hull (1996) to test language effects on three different cultural groups of bilinguals. Hull used a within-subjects, repeated measures design to assess bilinguals’ personality change in response to different languages of administration (in English and in the bilinguals’ native languages of Chinese, Korean, or Spanish, respectively) and detected between-language differences within each cultural group.
Language effects have also been detected with the Big Five Inventory (BFI). For example, Ramírez-Esparza, Gosling, Benet-Martínez, Potter, and Pennebaker (2006) found that, Spanish-English bilinguals were more extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious when they responded to the BFI questionnaire in English than in Spanish, and the differences were consistent with the personality prototypical in each culture. The BFI is based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM), a widely accepted trait model that describes personality variation along five dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Many believe that the structure of the FFM is universal and biologically based and thus transcends language and other cultural differences (Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001; McCrae & Costa, 1997; Wiggins & Trapnell, 1997; Yamagata et al., 2006). The existence and universality of the FFM has been supported through multicultural tests in over 50 cultures across six continents (McCrae, 2002; McCrae et al., 2005; Schmitt et al., 2007). The universal structure of the FFM implies uniform covariance among traits in humans despite the great diversity in culture, history, economy, social life, ideology, and other forms of cultural and behavioral expression. Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect that the FFM will be unaffected by the language of administration.
In that sense, the personality shift noted in Ramírez-Esparza and colleagues’ (2006) study seemingly challenges the core concept of personality, which is meant to be stable across time and situations. However, the strong correlations between the Spanish and English versions of the questionnaire suggest that individuals do tend to retain their rank ordering within a group, while the group shifts all together when different languages are used. Therefore, a Spanish-English bilingual extravert does not suddenly become an introvert when he or she changes language from English to Spanish, but becomes more extraverted when he or she uses English than Spanish, while retaining his or her rank ordering within the group (Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2006). The coexistence of stability and malleability of personality seems to be a likely explanation for the personality shift. Universality of the FFM means that the structure and features of the five personality traits can be found in all human groups, while cross-cultural differences imply that culture can nevertheless affect the expression of traits. Language as a powerful cultural cue can trigger cultural representations that make bilinguals display different personality traits in each language, contributing to the personality shift among bilinguals when different languages are used.
In any case, researchers’ over-reliance on self-reported personality questionnaires in many previous studies is methodologically limited itself, which might result in confounding of substantive and method variance. As pointed out by McCrae, Yik, Trapnell, Bond, and Paulhus (1998), the use of self-reports of one’s own personality places the same individual in dual positions as both the target and rater, making it difficult to ascertain whether culture has affected the personality characteristics of the target or the social judgment characteristics of the rater, or both. To go beyond the restrictions of self-reports, Chen and Bond (2010) examined the impact of language use on personality, by adopting both self-report and other-report methods in their studies. Written measures and actual conversations were used to examine whether Hong Kong Chinese-English bilinguals exhibited different patterns of personality, each associated with one of their two languages and the ethnicity of their interlocutors. Self-reports and behavioral observations confirmed the effects of language on various personality dimensions. However, after controlling for covariates, the net effects of language on personality shift were relatively weak. By adopting multiple methods in subsequent bilingual studies, language effects were found in dialectical thinking, and self-perceptions and other-perceptions of personality (Chen, Benet-Martínez, & Ng, 2014), and in self-perceived and observer-perceived competence and conscientiousness (Chen, Lam, Buchtel, & Bond, 2014). These results converge to show that self-perceptions and self-presentations change to fit the social contexts shaped by language and culture.
In addition to personality measures, language effects have also been evident in other individual difference variables among bilinguals and biculturals. For instance, a questionnaire on subjective modernity was used in a study by Bond and Yang (1982), in which Hong Kong Chinese-English bilinguals who responded in English endorsed more values and norms congruent with Western culture than those who responded to the same questionnaire in Chinese. Church, Katigbak, and Castañeda (1988) used both free-response and rating questionnaires to examine the language effects of data collection on healthy personality concepts among Filipino-English bilinguals. The two languages compared were English and Tagalog, a native language of the Philippines. Some language differences were found in both methods, many of which could not be simply attributed to translation complexity.
The host of studies mentioned above generally supported the existence of language effects, both in coordinate and compound bilinguals. However, there are some studies that documented language effects in one type of bilingual but not the other. For example, an examination of categorization (Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004) revealed that there was a strong language effect for the Taiwan and Mainland Chinese-English coordinate bilinguals, but no effect for the Hong Kong and Singapore Chinese-English compound bilinguals. For Taiwan and Mainland coordinate bilinguals, testing in Chinese language led to greater relationship preferences than testing in English language, as using Chinese might prompt Taiwan and Mainland coordinate bilinguals to think in a more Chinese fashion than when using English. Therefore, different representations are associated with different languages, and language can serve as a cue for reasoning style. In contrast, no language effect was found for the Hong Kong and Singapore compound bilinguals, as their Chinese and English languages were presumed to share the same representation system. Taken together, language effects are greater for coordinate bilinguals, who grew up in a single culture environment where one mode of thinking is dominant, than for compound bilinguals, who grew up in a mixed cultural environment. The findings imply that culture may in fact be the core element in language effects.
Qualitative and experimental evidence from the research of Luna and colleagues (2008) also showed that language effects are found in certain kinds of bilinguals only. In particular, language can activate distinct sets of culture-specific concepts among bilingual biculturals, but not among bilingual monoculturals. Bilingual biculturals refer to those who have been exposed to two cultural value systems, with identity constructs related to both cultures, and each culture linked to its own distinct language. On the other hand, bilingual monoculturals are those whose languages are not linked to different cultures, as their second language is learned without direct experience of the language’s cultural context. The findings indicated that, for language to serve as a cue to activate corresponding culture-specific concepts, the language must be learned through exposure to that culture, in which cultural values are internalized along the process of the second language acquisition.
Different cultural identities may be stored in separate knowledge systems in biculturals, and each structure may be activated by its corresponding language (Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002). Psychological adjustment is affected by self-perception including self-esteem and emotional organization. Previous research found that East-Asians generally report lower self-esteem than Westerners (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999). In addition, East-Asians are more dialectical in their emotional experience than their Western counterparts, suggesting that East-Asians are more accepting of the coexistence of opposite cognitions (Scollon, Diener, Oishi, & Biswas-Diener, 2005). A study investigating language effects on self-perception among Chinese-Canadian biculturals found that participants responding in Chinese reported lower self-esteem and greater balance between positive and negative mood states, than those responding in English (Ross et al., 2002). Converging results were obtained from an investigation on the within-person dynamic organization of emotion among biculturals. Perunovic, Heller, and Rafaeli (2007) found that when biculturals identify themselves with a particular cultural group, they display a distinct affective pattern congruent with that culture. Specifically, when East-Asian Canadian biculturals identified with a Western culture or spoke a non-Asian language, their positive affect and negative affect were negatively correlated. However, when they identified with an Asian culture or spoke an Asian language, that negative correlation disappeared, indicating a culturally congruent shifting of emotional structure. Taken together, the results supported the impactful language effects on biculturals’ psychological adjustment, by affecting their self-perception of mood states and self-esteem.
Language effects on personality characteristics can be explained by three major perspectives: cultural accommodation, cultural frame switching (CFS), and cultural mindsets.
Cultural accommodation provides one theoretical explanation for the shifting of one’s response patterns in the presence of cultural cues. From this perspective, bilinguals accommodate the cultural norms associated with the language they are currently using when they respond to situations (Bond & Yang, 1982). That is, language itself primes the bilinguals’ cultural-specific values, attitudes, and memories, which in turn affects their behavior. The use of a second language accesses the perceived cultural norms of the group most associated with that language, especially its prototypic trait profiles, thus activating behavioral expressions of personality that are appropriate in the corresponding linguistic-social context (Chen & Bond, 2010).
A conceptual framework parallel to cultural accommodation is CFS (Hong et al., 2000). Before discussing CFS, it is important to understand code switching, a key concept in bilingualism. Code switching refers to the process of switching between two languages (Saville-Troike, 1981). As different languages may be associated with particular cultural schemas and knowledge systems, code switching among bilinguals can activate identification with the corresponding culture (Luna et al., 2008), eliciting specific cultural experiences, values, self-evaluation, and self-esteem (Ross et al., 2002). In CFS, alternative cultural meaning systems of biculturals are activated when exposed to relevant cues, including language, associated with the respective cultures (Pouliasi & Verkuyten, 2007). The content of culture can be perceived as a compilation of mental frames that are internalized through individuals’ socialization and engagement in a cultural context (Brumbaugh, 2002). A mental frame refers to “an interpretation which is frequent, well-organized, memorable, which can be made from minimal cues, contains one or more prototypic instantiations, and is resistant to change” (D’Andrade, 1992, p. 29). Mental frames organize and manage the comprehension of abstract processes and are largely transparent to and implicit for the individual (Holland & Quinn, 1993; Holland & Valsiner, 1988). As each culture has its own frames (Hong et al., 2000), which are acquired and used in conjunction with the language of that culture (Foucault, 1972), language itself can be a cue that triggers different culture-specific frames (Luna et al., 2008). Differences in cultural frame content can be observed when seemingly exact translations of words in two different languages have different sets of culture-specific conceptual associations (Kroll & de Groot, 1997).
Although previous research has suggested that CFS can be elicited by language, only bilinguals who met very high standards of bilingual proficiency were sampled, as they would be confident in using both languages and could reasonably be assumed to adopt either language. Thus, when language triggers CFS, it also activates the relevant cognitive and affective associations (Hong et al., 2000). However, as bilingualism is a matter of degree rather than a discrete entity (Zhang & Schmitt, 2004), some bilinguals could be more proficient in one language than the other, and the language imbalance may impact their processing along with the activation potential of the two sets of cultural frames. For instance, when the weaker language is processed, its corresponding cultural frames may not be as readily accessible as the cultural frames associated with the stronger language (Luna et al., 2008). To address the language balance issue, recent bilingual research has tended to adopt a more stringent requirement for language competence (Chen & Bond, 2010; Luna et al., 2008; Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2006).
Another possible explanation for language effects is cultural mindsets. Cultural mindsets refer to mental representations or cognitive schemas of content, procedures, and goals embedded in cultural contexts, such as with the scripts associated with individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Sorensen, Reber, & Chen, 2009). Individualism and collectivism are often perceived as fixed and chronic, as supported by associated differences in values, self-concepts, styles of emotional expression, and relationships across cultures. However, some researchers suggest that cultural mindsets are malleable and can be cued in the moment through cultural priming, as posited by the culture-as-situated-cognition model (Oyserman et al., 2009). In addition to widely used priming tasks such as the pronoun circling task, language use is able to serve as a cultural prime and activate individuals’ cultural mindsets, as well as the self-concepts and psychological attributes regulated by those mindsets (see Oyserman & Lee, 2008 for a review).
The above three perspectives are conceptually similar in the sense that respondents display assimilation effects in the face of language primes, but they emphasize different aspects of the response patterns. Cultural accommodation is based on communication accommodation theory for communication strategies (Giles & Ogay, 2006), and thus focuses on bilinguals adjusting their communicative behaviors in accord with an outgroup member’s cultural norms when using the outgroup member’s language. The aim is to facilitate comprehension and develop a harmonious relationship with cultural others (e.g., Gallois, Ogay, & Giles, 2005). CFS is applicable to biculturals who have internalized two cultural systems, shifting cultural interpretative frames or schemas in response to social cues. Cultural mindsets may be adopted by monolinguals or monoculturals as mental representations or cognitive schemas containing culture-congruent content, procedures, and goals. Originally perceived as fixed and chronic, cultural mindsets are in fact malleable and volatile and can be activated by cultural primes. Thus, the three perspectives explain the shifting phenomenon with different emphases.
Finally, the issue of whether personality changes as a function of language is controversial. Some argue that personality shift in bilingual contexts is simply due to changes in the situation that elicit corresponding shift in attitudes, behaviors, social roles, or emotional attitudes (Ervin, 1964; Grosjean, 1982). Such a claim may be difficult to refute in many early studies in which coordinate bilinguals were sampled, who acquired their two languages in different contexts. In this case, it is too difficult to differentiate the language effect from the cultural effect that arises from the environment and the interlocutors when a particular language is used.
By including both coordinate and compound bilinguals in the same study, Ji and colleagues (2004) help shed light on the understanding of the language-culture paradox that language effects only occur in coordinate bilinguals but not in compound bilinguals, suggesting that culture, rather than language per se, is the underlying driving force of the observed personality shift. The role of culture in personality shift was further supported by the study of Luna and colleagues (2008), which found language-triggered frame switching only occurs in bilingual biculturals, not in bilinguals who are not bicultural, suggesting that it is not the language switch itself, but the language-linked cultural values that activate corresponding behavioral and attitudinal changes. Thus, it is the interplay of language and culture that affects the expression of personality.
The degree of bilingualism and biculturalism and the sensitivity of measurement tools all influence the strength of personality shift. In some cases, the language of administration is inconsistent in that some individuals complete their assessments in the host language, whereas others do so in their heritage language (Marsiglia, Kulis, Hecht, & Sills, 2004; Martinez, McClure, Eddy, & Wilson, 2011). Data are nevertheless pooled and analyzed across languages of assessment, by assuming—without explicit testing—that the measures were administered in the same way across languages (Schwartz et al., 2014). This practice fails to address language effects on personality measures and may result in some unknown amount of error variance and loss of test validity (Schwartz et al., 2014). To solve the problem, methodologists have explored various ways, for example, the concept of measurement equivalence (Knight, Roosa, & Umaña-Taylor, 2009), to assess whether a measure operates consistently across languages. Measurement equivalence refers to the extent to which self-report items convey the same meaning, relate to the associated constructs in the same manner, and cluster together in the same way, across languages of administration (Schwartz et al., 2014).
Throughout the past two decades, extensive examination of language effects on personality assessment has been conducted by Butcher and colleagues (e.g., Butcher, 1996, 2004; Butcher, Cabiya, Lucio, & Garrido, 2007; Butcher, Lim, & Nezami, 1998), particularly with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and MMPI-2. They concluded that for effective cross-cultural applications and adaptations of personality tests, bilingual test-retest studies should be conducted, and in a manner that the host language and the target-language version are administered within an interval of 1–2 weeks (Almagor & Nevo, 1996; Deinard, Butcher, Thao, Moua Vang, & Hang, 1996; Konraos, 1996; Pancheri, Sirigatti, & Biondi, 1996; Tran, 1996). The advantages of the bilingual test-retest design include its ability to eliminate the variance stemming from individual differences and its ability to estimate the variance due to language and all related interactions (Butcher, Mosch, Tsai, & Nezami, 2006). Furthermore, the process of acculturation may also affect personality evaluation in cultural settings; for example, MMPI-2 scores for recent immigrants tend to be more elevated than those originating from the same background but having resided in the host country for a longer period of time (Azan, 1989; Deinard et al., 1996; Sue, Keefe, Enomoto, Durvasula, & Chao, 1996; Tran, 1996; Velasquez, Maness, & Anderson, 2002). Although a conclusion is yet to be drawn on personality assessment in bilingual and bicultural contexts, findings do show that language proficiency and cultural frames associated with language use may have a direct effect on cross-language differences in personality.
Traditionally, bilingualism and biculturalism were studied separately in the literature, as the two concepts originally belonged to different academic fields. Recently, however, the emergence of interdisciplinary research on bilingualism and biculturalism has opened up a new window for researchers to peek into the once-mysterious relationship of language and culture. In doing so, researchers can attain a better understanding of the joint effects of language and culture on cognition, emotion, and behavior, leading to the conclusion that bilingualism and biculturalism are in fact inseparable. Over the decades, views regarding the impact of bilingualism and biculturalism on adjustment have gone from generally negative in early works to increasingly positive in current research. However, future research should move beyond the oversimplified positive versus negative views of bilingualism and biculturalism toward identifying the context in which they are beneficial or detrimental. Personality characteristics are not just main determinants of psychological well-being in general, but also key players in psychological adjustment in bilingual and bicultural contexts. Personality shifts of bilinguals across linguistic contexts have been documented in some studies, showing that language is a cultural cue that can trigger culture-congruent behavioral and attitudinal changes. However, the underlying force for personality shift is not the language itself, but the inseparable cultural frames and mindsets that attach to the language.
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