Verified by 
One of the oldest questions in the history of psychology is about how language influences the mind. Does the language we use impact how we see the world? We know that many of our mental processes are affected by language. Here are some warm-up examples before turning to a new study that suggests that the influence of language runs even deeper—in fact, as deep as it gets.
First warm-up example: Different languages segment the color space differently. Russian, for example, has two different words for what English speakers call "blue," roughly corresponding to light blue and dark blue. Does this imply that they perceive the world differently?
Some findings suggest so: Native Russian speakers see two shades of blue that saddle the divide between light blue and dark blue as more different than English native speakers. If the language we speak influences the way we see the world, then this is a major source of cross-cultural variations in perception.
The effects of the light blue vs. dark blue categorization on our perception are relatively minor. But there are more extreme examples.
Speakers of the Kuuk Thaayorre language in the aboriginal Pormpuraaw people who live in Queensland, Australia, perceive space very differently from the way we do. First, they represent the space around them geographically. So instead of saying that something is on their left, they say that it's to the West. But things get even more interesting when it comes to the representation of time.
Most of us think of time as flowing from left to right or from right to left, and this may have something to do with the direction in which we read. One reason to think so is that Arabic and Hebrew speakers tend to represent time as flowing from right to left.
An interesting exception to this rule, which is my third example, comes from the studies of Aymara speakers, who live in the Andes in South America. They represent time as flowing from front to back. So the past is ahead of us, whereas the future is behind us. While this contrasts with some of the metaphors we English speakers use (as we talk about the future being ahead of us), it could also be said to be more in line with how we actually experience time (as we only have access to what has already happened).
The three examples I started with (color, space, time) are, in some ways quite abstract categories. And showing that language influences the mental representation of these aspects of the human mind may not be that surprising. A new study, in contrast, shows that even the most basic, least abstract mental phenomenon is affected by language: pain.
Pain processing has long been considered to be quick and automatic; it is perhaps the last mental phenomenon that one would expect to be influenced by language. This makes the new findings about the language-pain influence all the more surprising and unexpected.
The experimental setup was simple: Bilingual subjects (who spoke both English and Spanish at a native level) were primed with either English or Spanish sentences and then were administered painful stimuli. The first piece of finding is that the subjects' assessment of the strength of the pain differed depending on the linguistic context. This, in itself, says nothing about pain processing and pain perception, only about pain reports.
What is unusual about the study is that during the whole procedure, the subjects were in an fMRI scanner and the activation in the somatosensory cortices also differed depending on the linguistic context. So it is not only the (linguistic) report of the strength of the pain that depended on the linguistic priming, but pain processing itself also depended on linguistic priming.
The Spanish linguistic context is the one that led to the more severe pain, although it's too early to speculate about the reasons for this. The study was limited to these two languages and it would be important (and very interesting for the general public) to see how these results would generalise to other languages.
But this study does have some big-picture consequences. Firstly, pain perception is not as simple and "dumb" as it is often taken to be. Secondly, even the most basic aspects of perception (such as pain perception) are deeply intertwined with language processing.
