Picture this! The effects of positivity bias, saliency, and verbal politeness in valence framing research.

Different factors have been argued to play a role for the two framing types: saliency for facts, and verbal politeness for evaluations. Our studies combine these factors.

Participants first (N=50) performed a priming task, in which they judged positive/negative and factual/evaluative picture descriptions, and a production task, in which they described the same pictures with or without explicit (im)politeness instructions. Results indicate a positive bias in the priming task, with speakers reacting faster to positive wordings. When producing frames, they selected positive words to be polite and negative words to be impolite.