Emotional Framing Research Articles

The Interplay Between Cognitive and Emotional Framing in Gaining Support for AI-based Innovations

The Interplay Between Cognitive and Emotional Framing in Gaining Support for AI-based Innovations

Communicating Green Innovation to Online Communities: Evidence from Sports Mega Events

Tourism and event organizers implement green innovation to mitigate the negative environmental impacts they cause. However, how to effectively communicate these green innovations to online communities remains a challenge. Drawing on message framing and construal level theories, we collected 503 tweets and used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach to analyze the textual data. First, we conducted abductive coding analysis, identifying two novel framing forms, innovative and value chain framings. Second, using negative binomial regressions, we found that input-value (vs. output-value) framing is often used but decreases online engagement. Moreover, proximal (vs. distal) framing is less used but enhances online engagement. Third, we explored the moderating effect of green innovation, revealing that innovative and proximal framings are more effective for green organizational innovation, whereas emotional framing is more effective for green service innovation. This study offers novel insights on how to strategically communicate green innovation to event online communities.

Tourism, War, and Media: The Russia-Ukraine War Narrative

Underpinned by framing theory, this study examines how the mainstream news media constructs the war and tourism narratives. Using frame analysis and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), this paper systematically unpacks the intertwined relationship between war and tourism in constructing its narratives during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Three main frames were identified, including “impact,” “response” and “status,” which encompass eight specific issues. Results of Qualitative Comparative Analysis show that there are three influential narrative patterns associated with negative emotional frames: dashed hopes in tourism destinations, debates over travel bans versus human rights principles, and pessimism and uncertainty in the tourism industry. This research advances tourism literature by providing a new interpretative and analytical lens to the intricate interplay between war and tourism, serving as an important reference for future frame analysis research in tourism.

Effects of Scanning Health News Headlines on Trust in Science: An Emotional Framing Perspective

ABSTRACT Rooted in the emotions-as-frames model (EFM), this research examines how hope, fear, and annoyance are evoked through health news headline scanning, and how these emotions influence perceptions of news and medical science institutions as well as health behavioral intentions. A sample of U.S. adults (N = 327) were assigned to one of four headline framing conditions expected to associate with different emotions (positive future frame-hope; threat frame-fear/anxiety; reversal frame-annoyance; and control-neutral) and then asked about their emotional states, trust in science and news, and health-related behavioral intentions. Overall, health news headlines generated more hope than any other emotion across all conditions, and positive future-framed headlines evoked more hope than other framed headlines. Felt hope, in turn, generated greater trust in news and science, higher expectations of medical breakthroughs and cures, and greater intention to engage in preventative health behaviors. Felt anxiety had marginal positive benefits whereas felt annoyance negatively impacted the outcomes of interest. Notably, felt emotion mediated the headline frame-outcome relationships in the positive future/hope condition. These findings offer some support for the EFM and demonstrate that scanning headlines imbued with specific emotional frames can influence important health-related outcomes through the emotions they evoke. We discuss both the theoretical and practical implication of these findings.

Radicalism, identity construction and emotionality in social movements: #BogaziciDireniyor and the challenge to authoritarianism

ABSTRACT Drawing upon recent insights in the social movements literature that have been looking at different facets of radicalisation, this paper explores processes of identity formation and ‘emotion transformation’ happening at the collective level and expressed through forms of non-conventional political participation. The key case study that is taken as an example is that of the recent pacific protests that took place at Boğaziçi University. Similar to recent studies that shed light on the study of radicalism in peaceful protests, we look at the main frames through which demands for social change by young activists participating in the protests are constructed and at the emotional frames that express grievances. In doing so, we focus on the representation of the movement on Twitter. These have the aim of challenging hegemonic discourses promoted by the status quo through forms of ‘radicalism through protest’ rather than ‘radicalism through violence’. In exploring this area, we conduct a qualitative analysis of social media content looking at the use and reproduction of key messages meant to share common frames that construct processes of collective identification but also at the processes of ‘emotion transformation’ that shape radical collective claims and which seek to challenge the dominant political system.

Conversations on grief and hope: a collaborative autoethnographic account exploring the lifeworlds of international youth engaged with climate action

This paper explores the lifeworlds of international youth involved in climate and/or environmental social action, narratives that have been largely absent from a literature that has tended to focus on ‘traditional’ youth activists located in the urban Global North. Written as a novel collaborative autoethnography involving youth as co-authors, the paper a) collectively reflects on the stories of youth from different countries and cultures on their journeys towards climate action, and b) foregrounds an emotional framing to examine these experiences. The youth co-authors, whose experiences are the focus of this paper, form part of innovative international Youth Advisory Board, set up to provide peer support to youth new to climate and environmental social action, as part of our British Academy Youth Futures-funded participatory action research project. We examine the youth’s narratives exploring opportunities and barriers they have navigated, their inspirations and the intersections with a range of other socio-cultural factors.

Effect of Framing and Feedback Levels on Funding and Emotional Support in Medical Crowdfunding

Despite the rise of medical crowdfunding and its benefits to patients, including reducing financial hardships and providing emotional support, limited attention has been paid to how a medical crowdfunding campaign organizer can drive performance. In this study, the authors investigate how the communication style used in a medical crowdfunding campaign can affect the funding performance and emotional support received. They find that emotional framing and the level of feedback communicated positively affect funding and emotional support and discuss its implications.

Emotions: functions and significance for attitudes, behaviour, and communication

Abstract Emotions are regularly cited as vital components of effective strategic communication. However, there is relatively little guidance about how emotions should be used. Eliciting emotions is key to persuasion because attitudes have a cognitive and emotive component, with predictable physiological outcomes that make messages more resonant and impactful on behaviour, supporting policy objectives. This article shows that communicators—in the field of migration and beyond—should choose their campaign’s emotional frame according to their desired physiological and behavioural reaction. This article applies the emotion schema of Plutchik to offer 32 separate emotions and their theorised physiological reactions, examples of stimuli, and behavioural societal effects. Furthermore, emotional outcomes can be altered via narratives, frames, personal-based messages, facial expressions and body language, aesthetics, ordering (‘emotional flow’), intensities, and combinations. Finally, the limits of emotion-based communication—not least the ‘appeal to emotion’ logical fallacy—and how to overcome those limits—grounding emotion-based communication in facts, values, identities, and efficacy—are considered. Emotion-based communication in the field of migration, although widely used, is largely untested so communicators should test different approaches but also can take lessons from fields such as corporate, health, and climate change communication.

Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.

Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information seeking about COVID-19 exposure risk. In Study 1 (N=221,829), we conducted a large-scale social media field study. Using Facebook advertisements, we targeted users by age and political attitudes. Episodic specificity drove engagement: Advertisements that contextualized risk in specific scenarios produced the highest click-through rates, across all demographic groups. In Study 2, we replicated and extended our findings in an online experiment (N=4,233). Message specificity (but not self-relevance or emotional valence) drove interest in learning about COVID-19 risks. Across both studies, we found that older adults and liberals were more interested in learning about COVID-19 risks. However, message specificity increased engagement across demographic groups. Overall, evoking specific scenarios motivated information seeking about COVID-19, facilitating risk communication to a broad audience.

Emotional framing in online environmental activism: Pairing a Twitter study with an offline experiment.

As the consequences of anthropogenic climate change become more apparent, social media has become a central tool for environmental activists to raise awareness and to mobilize society. In two studies, we examine how the emotional framing of messages posted by environmental activists influences engagement and behavioral intentions toward environmental action. In the first study, tweets (N = 510k) of 50 environmental activists posted between November 2015 and December 2020 are examined to measure their emotional content and its relation to tweet diffusion. Environment-related tweets are found to be shared more the less they contain positive emotion and the more they contain negative emotion. This result supports the negativity bias on social media. In Study 2 (N = 200), we experimentally test whether negatively vs. positively framed environmental content leads to increased reported intent to engage with collective action, and whether mood mediates that link. We find both direct and indirect effects on reported climate action intentions when mood is used as a mediator. The negative mood resulting from seeing negative tweets makes participants more likely to report higher action intention (indirect effect)-congruent with Study 1. However, seeing negative tweets also makes participants less inclined to act (direct effect), indicating a suppression effect and the presence of other factors at work on the pathway between information and action intent formation. This work highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of this relation and motivates more experimental work to identify other relevant factors, as well as how they relate to one another.

Badhyata and dukha: emotions, labour and migration across education migration to Australia and labour migration to Qatar from Nepal

ABSTRACT Badhyata (compulsion) and dukha (hardship) are central emotional frames that drive and characterise the migration of both education migrants and labour migrants from Nepal. Migration from Nepal, therefore, entails a compulsion, and the migration experience is often one of dukha. Taking the case of education migration to Australia and labour migration to Qatar from Nepal, this article examines how diverse migration conditions differently shape and influence the migrants’ subjective experiences as well as that of their families. Drawing on data from a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted among Nepali education migrants in Sydney, labour migrants in Qatar, and their families in Nepal, the analysis centres around emotions attached to work/labour and migration and how it is experienced, not only by the migrants but also by the families in Nepal. In doing so, this article argues that while compulsion initially drives both types of migration, because of the difference in migration conditions and the emotions attached to future possibilities, the qualities of compulsion across the two migration pathways vary significantly, and differently structure the understanding of dukha.

The effects of information framing on self-protective behavior: Evidence from the COVID-19 vaccine uptake.

The Healthy China 2030 strategy outlines the government's plans for healthcare reform, emphasizing the need for increased awareness about infectious diseases to prevent and fight future infections. Information campaigns can be used as a medium to raise awareness and encourage citizens' willingness to protect themselves against diseases, such as COVID-19. Extant studies have found that individual health behavior decision-making can be changed under different information frames. However, limited evidence is available about emerging infectious diseases. Based on the Prospect Theory and Theory of Planned Behavior, the impact of information frames on self-protective behavior-vaccination against COVID-19 is investigated in this study. A 2(gain/loss frame)*2(factual/emotional frame) intergroup experimental design was designed to explore the effects of different information frames. 228 valid participants in China were recruited and the experiment was performed online. First, the gain frame was more effective in promoting public self-protection behavior than the loss frame under information frame intervention. Compared with the factual frame, the emotional frame is more effective in reducing individual risk perception. Second, perceptual behavior control has masking effects on self-protection behavior under the influence of the gain/loss frame. Third, age, subjective norms, attitudes, and the gain frame, have predictive effects on self-protection behavior. This study provides empirical evidence on the impact of information framing interventions on public self-protection behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and provides important practical implications for public administrators and media practitioners.

COVID-19 topics and emotional frames in vaccine hesitation: A social media text and sentiment analysis.

Addressing gaps in COVID-19 vaccine-hesitancy research, the current study aimed to add depth and nuance to the exploratory research examining vaccine-hesitant groups. Using a larger, but more focused conversation occurring on social media, the results can be used by health communicators to frame emotionally resonant messaging to improve COVID-19 vaccine advocacy while also mitigating negative concerns for vaccine-hesitant individuals. Social media mentions were collected using a social media listening software, Brandwatch, to examine topics and sentiments in COVID-19 hesitancy discourse during a period of September 1, 2020, through December 31, 2020. The results from this query included publicly available mentions on two popular social media sites, Twitter and Reddit. The dataset of 14,901 global, English language messages were analyzed using a computer-assisted process in SAS text-mining and Brandwatch software. The data revealed eight unique topics before being analyzed by sentiment. Among the COVID-19 hesitancy data, trust-related topics emerged that included declining vaccine acceptance, a parallel pandemic of distrust, and a call for politicians to let the scientific process work, among others. Positive sentiment revealed interest in the sources which included healthcare professionals, doctors, and government organizations. Pfizer was found to elicit both positive and negative emotions in the vaccine-hesitancy data. The negative sentiment tended to dominate the hesitancy conversation, accelerating once vaccines hit the market. Relevant topics were identified to help support targeted communication, strategically accelerate vaccine acceptance, and mitigate COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among the public. Strategic methods of online and offline messaging tactics are suggested to reach diverse, malleable populations of interest. Topics of personal anecdotes of safety, effectiveness, and recommendations among families are identified as persuasive communication opportunities.

Deep Learning Pipeline for Spotting Macro- and Micro-expressions in Long Video Sequences Based on Action Units and Optical Flow

This paper is an extension of our previously published ACM Multimedia 2022 paper, which was ranked 3rd in the macro-expressions (MaEs) and micro-expressions (MEs) spotting task of the FME challenge 2021. In our earlier work, a deep learning framework based on facial action units (AUs) was proposed to emphasize both local and global features to deal with the MaEs and MEs spotting tasks. In this paper, an advanced Concat-CNN model is proposed to not only utilize facial action units (AU) features, which our previous work proved were more effective in detecting MaEs, but also to fuse the optical flow features to improve the detection performance of MEs. The advanced Concat-CNN proposed in this paper not only considers the intra-features correlation of a single frame but also the inter-features correlation between frames. Further, we devise a new adaptive re-labeling method by labeling the emotional frames with distinctive scores. This method takes into account the dynamic changes in expressions to further improve the overall detection performance. Compared with our earlier work and several existing works, the newly proposed deep learning pipeline is able to achieve a better performance in terms of the overall F1-scores: 0.2623 on CAS(ME)2, 0.2839 on CAS(ME)2-cropped, and 0.3241 on SAMM-LV, respectively.

FRAMING CLIMATE-CHANGE INFORMATION TO PROMOTE ACTION IN OLDER ADULTS

Abstract Climate change poses an existential global risk, and mitigation requires population-level behavioral change. Due to their shortened time horizon, older adults may not perceive climate change as a personal risk within their lifetime and may be less likely to take action to combat climate change. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen, 2006) posits that, as people age and perceive a shorter time horizon ahead, they become more focused on maintaining emotional wellbeing. This study, rooted in SST, manipulated the emotional framing of climate-change information in a sample of U.S. older adults. Participants were given EPA climate-change information localized to their state of residence and were instructed that, by taking action, the impact of climate change could be reduced (instilling hope) or that, by not taking action, the impact of climate change could be exacerbated (instilling fear). Afterward, they completed measures assessing their willingness to engage in pro-environmental behaviors and support of macro-level legislation to combat climate change. Compared to older adults who received the "hope" frame, older adults who received the "fear" frame reported greater willingness to engage in pro-environmental behaviors (p = 0.007) and greater support of legislation to combat climate change (p = 0.038), perhaps an effect of older adults' motivation to reduce the negative affective state induced by the "fear" frame. Implications of these results for catalyzing older adults toward climate action are discussed.

HOW DO TECHNOLOGICAL FRAMES FEEL? BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION IN PRE-DIGITAL COMPANIES AND THE EMOTIONAL IMPACT OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

The disruptive character of digital technologies can lead to an existential threat for pre-digital firms when their managers do not assess the opportunities new digital technology can provide. Strategic actors rely on their technological frames to interpret a specific technology and whether and how they can benefit from it, which can explain why there is heterogeneity in such technology-driven Business Model Innovation (BMI). However, the literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of this critical management tool because the emotional grounding of technological frames has not been examined. We conducted a qualitative case study research. Our results are based on 36 interviews. It turns out that emotions impact how people respond to digital technologies. These insights extend our understanding of technological frames as well as emotional framing and their mutual relationship and how this affects technology-driven BMI. In addition, we provide practical implications.

Local Governments’ Framing of Social Media Messages and Citizens’ Responses (WITHDRAWN)

Public administrations frequently communicate with citizens and often use social media to do so. The importance of such communication is elevated in times of crisis. Citizens have an increased demand for information and interaction and administrations want to limit the extent and consequences of the crisis. Previous research has analyzed how public administrations communicate during a crisis, but little is known about how citizens respond to these messages and how their responses change based on the framing of administrations’ messages. We analyze how different rhetorical frames used in local governments’ social media messages affect three types of citizen responses: approval, diffusion, and engagement. We hypothesize several relationships based on the expectancy-disconfirmation framework and emotions as social information theory. The hypothesized effects are tested on a novel dataset of German local governments’ Twitter communications consisting of more than 50,000 messages posted over a period of six months and more than 700,000 reactions to these messages. The results show that the use of analytical framing increases citizens’ approval, diffusion, and engagement. Affective framing is found to positively influence approval, while negatively affecting diffusion and engagement. Disentangling what drives these diverging effects, we show that positive emotional framing positively affects citizens’ approval and negatively affects diffusion and engagement. On the other hand, negative emotions increase citizens’ diffusion and engagement. Particularly these contrasting effects emphasize the need to better understand the role of rhetorical framing in public sector communication, as rhetorical frames might affect citizen reactions in opposing ways. Besides these theoretical implications, several managerial implications for public sector communication can be derived.

The use of emotions in conspiracy and debunking videos to engage publics on YouTube

With the rise of digital media, conspiracy theories infamous for their emotional manipulation have challenged science epistemology and democratic discourse. Despite extensive literature on misinformation and the role of emotion in persuasion, less is understood about how emotion is used in conspiracy and debunking messages on video platforms and the impact of emotional framing on public engagement with science on social media. Our article fills this gap by analyzing thousands of YouTube videos that propagate or debunk COVID-19 conspiracy theories from March to May 2020. We found that conspiracy and debunking videos used the emotions of trust and fear differently depending on the issue framing of the conspiracy. Our article also reveals a dilemma facing debunking messages—when debunking videos used more trust-related emotions, these videos received more likes yet fewer views. These findings shed new light on the role of emotion on user engagement with misinformation and its correction on digital platforms.

Let’s Profitably Fight Poverty, Shall We? How Managers Use Emotional Framing to Develop Base of the Pyramid Ventures Inside a Large Fast-moving Consumer Goods Company

Entering the Economic Base of the Pyramid (BoP) is often portrayed as an effective way for multinational corporations (MNCs) to grow and alleviate poverty, yet only few MNCs succeed. Although scholars have suggested that emotional arguments may be critical in motivating MNCs to engage at the BoP, it has remained unexplored how managers who develop BoP ventures inside MNCs use emotional framing to persuade organizational members to support their initiatives. Building on a multiple-case study of a Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Company, we find that captivating, solidifying, and perpetuating emotional frames allowed managers to earn and maintain commitment from volunteers and senior managers and sustain venturing efforts up until a stage where ventures were considered for launch despite an obvious sense of profitability. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of processes that enable BoP venture development inside MNCs, and contribute to the literatures on emotional framing and corporate entrepreneurship.

The Importance of Project Description to Charitable Crowdfunding Success: The Mediating Role of Forwarding Times.

The COVID-19 outbreak has been a public health crisis of international concern, causing huge impact on people’s lives. As an important part of social public crisis management, how to quickly and effectively raise resources to participate in emergency relief in the era of self-media is a common challenge faced by global charitable organizations. This article attempts to use empirical evidence from Tencent charitable crowdfunding platform, the largest charitable crowdfunding platform in China, to answer this question. We consider 205 COVID-19 charitable projects and 11,177,249 donors to assess the process by which non-profit organizations raise funds through the information about project descriptions. Based on the effects of information and emotional framing, we explore the effects of the readability (i.e., complexity and understandability) and negative tone of the project description on fundraising amount. We then investigate the mediating role of forwarding times, as affective response to the text might explain forwarding times, which in turn affects money raised by increasing the visibility of the campaign. On this basis, the moderating role of recipient’s crisis involvement is tested during this process. The empirical results indicate that the complexity of the description will reduce the fundraising amount, while understandability and negative tone help to improve it. Furthermore, we found that forwarding times played an important mediating role in this process. Then the buffer effect of crisis involvement on the negative effect of complexity was validated, and its amplification on the positive effects of understandability was also verified.