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

In earlier research on valence framing, factual and evaluative frames have been studied separately. 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. Without politeness instructions, speakers still showed a tendency to be polite in positive, but not in negative situations. Instead, in the case of evaluative sentences in negative situations, speakers tended to select the frame that was most salient to that speaker. Saliency did not influence frame production for factual sentences.

The studies were preregistred; the preregistration can be found here: https://osf.io/q9u6b