Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents the results of an observational study on therelationship between multilingualism and lower Intolerance ofUncertainty (IoU). A group of over two hundred multilingualand monolingual individuals filled in an online survey that con-tained items about one’s language profile, cross-cultural expe-rience, and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale-12 (IUS-12)– a psychometrically-sound instrument to assess one’s vulner-ability towards uncertain situations on an emotional, behav-ioral and cognitive level. We ask whether highly multilingualpeople are less likely to fear unknowns as a result of their ex-posure to linguistic and/or cultural uncertainty while learningforeign languages and/or staying abroad. The results show thatan advanced knowledge of multiple languages and longer staysabroad correlate with lower aversion towards uncertain situa-tions, thus, lower scores on the IUS-12. The study opens upnew avenues for further investigation into how multilingual-ism and multiculturalism shape one’s cognition and might havepositive effects on mental well-being.