The psychophysiology of interpreting emotional language in the audiovisual modality

Recent decades have shown a growing interest in the psychophysiological aspects of interpreting. Among various methods employed to study the process of interpreting, electrodermal activity (EDA) and cardiac measurements have gained prominence, particularly in the context of affective processing. Recent EDA research has suggested that interpreters respond to the affective content present in the source language (Korpal & Jankowiak, 2021; Korpal & Jasielska, 2019). In this study, we aimed to test the role of interpreting direction in the process of interpreting audiovisual stimuli of positive, negative, and neutral valence. Professional interpreters with Polish as their native language and English as their foreign language interpreted sets of sentences in both the Polish–English and English–Polish interpreting directions. We employed EDA and heart rate (HR) measures, along with self-report and response time analyses. The study results suggest that affect-laden stimuli (positive and negative) may evoke elevated emotional responses relative to neutral sentences. Interpreting from the native language (L1–L2) was shown to be more emotionally taxing than L2–L1 interpreting, as reflected in the behavioral data. The study contributes to our understanding of emotional language processing in interpreting and points to the role of affect in interpreting practice.