How do faces with social-cultural identity affect bilingual language control? We approach this question by looking at the switch cost patterns and reversed language dominance effect, which are suggested to reflect bilingual language control mechanisms, in the absence (i.e., baseline context) or presence of faces with socio-cultural identity (Asian or Caucasian). In separate blocks, the face matched (i.e., congruent context) or mismatched (i.e., incongruent context) the language to be spoken. In addition, cue preparation time was manipulated to be long (Experiment 1) or short (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a unique asymmetric switch cost with larger costs for L2 was observed in the congruent context as compared with the baseline and incongruent contexts. Furthermore, the reversed language dominance effect was not modulated across contexts. These results suggest a critical role of contextual faces in modulating local but not global language control. Thus, bilingual language control changes flexibly within an environment that includes faces with socio-cultural identity.

Affective concepts can be described in terms of space, which is known as the valence-space metaphor. Previous studies have not investigated either the specifics of this metaphor on the transverse and vertical axes or the time course of this metaphoric association. With Chinese participants, we used a spatial cue task to study the valence-space metaphor on the transverse (left-and-right; Experiment 1A) and vertical (upper-and-lower; Experiment 1B) axes. After being shown an affective word and asked to keep it in mind, the participants were given a spatial target detection task. The results revealed that the metaphoric association was only found on the vertical axis. More specifically, keeping a positive word in mind facilitated the detection of the upper target, but no such effect was found in the detection of the lower target. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, we manipulated the duration of time (100 ms, 500 ms, and 1000 ms) between the offset of the affective word and the onset of the spatial target (i.e., interstimulus intervals, ISI), to test the dynamic time course of the valence-space metaphor on the vertical axis. The results showed that when ISI was 100ms, keeping a positive word in mind facilitated the detection of the upper target and keeping a negative word in mind facilitated the detection of the lower target. However, when the ISI was 500 or 1000 ms, keeping a positive word in mind facilitated the detection of the upper target and no such effect was found in the detection of the lower target, indicating that ISI might be important in the valence-space metaphoric association. In sum, we found that the processing of affective valence activated the vertical spatial axis but not the transverse axis. Further, the association might be modulated by ISI, indicating that it may be related to attention allocation.