The Psychology of Framing: How Everyday Language Shapes the Way We Think, Feel, and Act.

When we use language to communicate, we must choose what to say, what not to say, and how to say it. That is, we must decide how to the message. These linguistic choices matter: Framing a discussion one way or another can influence how people think, feel, and act in many important domains, including politics, health, business, journalism, law, and even conversations with loved ones.

Emotion regulation elicits cross-linguistically shared and language-specific forms of linguistic distancing.

Cognitively reappraising a stressful experience-reinterpreting the situation to blunt its emotional impact-is effective for regulating negative emotions. English speakers have been shown to engage in linguistic distancing when reappraising, spontaneously using words that are more abstract or impersonal. Across two preregistered studies (N = 299), we investigated whether such shifts in language use generalize to Spanish, a language proposed to offer unique tools for expressing psychological distance.

Even simple framing effects are rational.

Bermúdez persuasively argues that framing effects are not as irrational as commonly supposed. In focusing on the reasoning of individual decision-makers in complex situations, however, he neglects the crucial role of the social-communicative context for eliciting certain framing effects. We contend that many framing effects are best explained in terms of basic, rational principles of discourse processing and pragmatic reasoning.

Who's the "Real" Victim? How Victim Framing Shapes Attitudes Toward Sexual Assault.

People accused of sexual assault are often described as the "real" victim by their defenders, but the impact of "victim framing" on public opinion is unknown. We investigated this issue across four experiments ( = 2,614). Online U.

Is Emotional Magnitude Spatialized? A Further Investigation.

Accumulating evidence suggests that different magnitudes (e.g., number, size, and duration) are spatialized in the mind according to a common left-right metric, consistent with a generalized system for representing magnitude.

Compound Words Reflect Cross-Culturally Shared Bodily Metaphors.

Parts of the body are often embedded in the structure of compound words, such as heartbreak and brainchild. We explored the relationships between the semantics of compounds and their constituent body parts, asking whether these relationships are largely arbitrary or instead reflect deeper metaphorical mappings shared across languages and cultures. In three studies, we found that U.

Right idea, wrong magnitude system.

Leibovich et al. claim that number representations are non-existent early in life and that the associations between number and continuous magnitudes reside in stimulus confounds. We challenge both claims - positing, instead, that number is represented independently of continuous magnitudes already in infancy, but is nonetheless more deeply connected to other magnitudes through adulthood than acknowledged by the "sense of magnitude" theory.

Revisiting the role of language in spatial cognition: Categorical perception of spatial relations in English and Korean speakers.

The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support/nonsupport distinction.

Registered Replication Report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988).

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, people's affective responses can be influenced by their own facial expression (e.g., smiling, pouting), even when their expression did not result from their emotional experiences.

Categorical Perception Beyond the Basic Level: The Case of Warm and Cool Colors.

Categories can affect our perception of the world, rendering between-category differences more salient than within-category ones. Across many studies, such categorical perception (CP) has been observed for the basic-level categories of one's native language. Other research points to categorical distinctions beyond the basic level, but it does not demonstrate CP for such distinctions.

Gamble on gaze: Eye movements reflect the numerical value of blackjack hands.

We used a novel task-a blackjack game that naturally involves mental summation of numerical values-to investigate the role of attention in the mental number line (MNL) and to provide insight into the ecological validity of this representational format. By analyzing the spatial position of participants' spontaneous, task-irrelevant eye movements, we avoided some of the limitations of previous research on the MNL, in which the findings could be attributed to task-specific factors such as the use of overt spatial cues. In two experiments, we found that eye movements along the horizontal axis reflected the overall numerical value of participants' hands, with smaller-value hands eliciting fixations toward the left of the screen and larger-value hands eliciting fixations toward the right.

Spatial language as a window on representations of three-dimensional space.

Recent research investigating the language–thought interface in the spatial domain points to representations of the horizontal and vertical dimensions that closely resemble those posited by Jeffery et al. However, the findings suggest that such representations, rather than being tied to navigation, may instead reflect more general properties of the perception of space.

When numbers get heavy: is the mental number line exclusively numerical?

The mental number line, with its left-to-right orientation of increasing numerical values, is often regarded as evidence for a unique connection between space and number. Yet left-to-right orientation has been shown to extend to other dimensions, consistent with a general magnitude system wherein different magnitudes share neural and conceptual resources. Such observations raise a fundamental, yet relatively unexplored, question about spatial-numerical associations: What is the nature of the information represented along the mental number line? Here we show that this information is not exclusive to number, simultaneously accommodating numerical and non-numerical magnitudes.

Spatial language and the psychological reality of schematization.

Although the representations underlying spatial language are often assumed to be schematic in nature, empirical evidence for a schematic format of representation is lacking. In this research, we investigate the psychological reality of such a format, using simulated motion during scene processing--previously linked to schematization--as a diagnostic. One group of participants wrote a verbal description of a scene and then completed a change detection task assessing simulated motion, while another group completed only the latter task.

Orienting numbers in mental space: horizontal organization trumps vertical.

While research on the spatial representation of number has provided substantial evidence for a horizontally oriented mental number line, recent studies suggest vertical organization as well. Directly comparing the relative strength of horizontal and vertical organization, however, we found no evidence of spontaneous vertical orientation (upward or downward), and horizontal trumped vertical when pitted against each other (Experiment 1). Only when numbers were conceptualized as magnitudes (as opposed to nonmagnitude ordinal sequences) did reliable vertical organization emerge, with upward orientation preferred (Experiment 2).

Does categorical perception in the left hemisphere depend on language?

Categorical perception (CP) refers to the influence of category knowledge on perception and is revealed by a superior ability to discriminate items across categories relative to items within a category. In recent years, the finding that CP is lateralized to the left hemisphere in adults has been interpreted as evidence for a kind of CP driven by language. The present research challenges this conclusion.

Common spatial organization of number and emotional expression: a mental magnitude line.

Converging behavioral and neural evidence suggests that numerical representations are mentally organized in left-to-right orientation. Here we show that this format of spatial organization extends to emotional expression. In Experiment 1, right-side responses became increasingly faster as number (represented by Arabic numerals) or happiness (depicted in facial stimuli) increased, for judgments completely unrelated to magnitude.

Linguistic relativity.

The central question in research on linguistic relativity, or the Whorfian hypothesis, is whether people who speak different languages think differently. The recent resurgence of research on this question can be attributed, in part, to new insights about the ways in which language might impact thought. We identify seven categories of hypotheses about the possible effects of language on thought across a wide range of domains, including motion, color, spatial relations, number, and false belief understanding.