What is French for deja Descriptions of deja vu in native French and English speakers

Little is known about how people characterise and classify the experience of deja vu. The term deja vu might capture a range of different phenomena and people may use it differently. We examined the description of deja vu in two languages: French and English, hypothesising that the use of deja vu would vary between the two languages. In French, the phrase deja vu can be used to indicate a veridical experience of recognition - as in ``I have already seen this face before''. However, the same is not true in English. In an online questionnaire, we found equal rates of deja vu amongst French and English speakers, and key differences in how the experience was described. As expected, the French group described the experience as being more frequent, but there was the unexpected finding that they found it to be more troubling. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.