Bilinguals experience diminished emotion when using their foreign compared with their native language. The diminished emotion has been shown to lead to more lenient moral evaluations in a foreign language. Here we show that non-native speakers of English are less sensitive to emotional mitigating circumstances of a crime than native speakers, presumably because of the diminished experience emotion. This can lead non-native speakers to provide harsher, rather than more lenient, evaluations. Native and non-native speakers of English recommended sentence duration for crimes committed because of mitigating emotional circumstances (e.g., fraud to pay spouse's medical treatment) or for selfish reasons (e.g., buying luxury goods). Native English speakers differentiated more between the two types of scenarios than non-native speakers did. The study thus provides preliminary evidence that processing information in a foreign language can influence decisions, and that the directionality of the effect depends on the role of emotion in the context.

中文翻译：

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母语人士和非母语人士会做出不同的司法判决吗？

与母语相比，双语者在使用外语时的情感会减弱。事实证明，情感的减弱会导致外语中的道德评价更加宽松。在这里，我们表明，与母语人士相比，非英语母语人士对犯罪的情绪减轻情节不太敏感，大概是因为体验情绪减弱。这可能会导致非母语人士提供更严厉而不是更宽松的评价。对于因减轻情感因素（例如，欺诈支付配偶医疗费用）或出于自私原因（例如，购买奢侈品）而犯下的罪行，英语母语和非英语人士建议判处刑期。与非母语人士相比，以英语为母语的人对这两种场景的区分更大。因此，这项研究提供了初步证据，表明处理外语信息可以影响决策，并且效果的方向性取决于情绪在上下文中的作用。