The Impact of Native Language Annotation of Affective Lexicon on Moral Foreign Language Effect

This project investigates the Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE), where people make more utilitarian moral judgments in a foreign language than in their native tongue. Building on the Reduced Emotionality Hypothesis, we hypothesize that the MFLE is driven by a weakened emotional response to foreign language text. Through three experiments, we systematically examine if directly annotating emotion-laden words with native-language translations can increase their emotional salience and thereby attenuate or reverse the MFLE. We expect that native-language annotation of emotion words will reduce utilitarian bias in a foreign language context.