The Double Framing Effect of Emotive Metaphors in Argumentation

The landslide's conceptualizing economic decline and its framing effect: Mandarin evidence

Conceptual metaphors are essential for explaining and understanding social concerns. Natural disaster metaphors are commonly employed to access the abstract and negative impacts of social issues. Five of the top 10 most prevalent natural disaster frames in the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL)-earthquake, flood, fire hazard, drought, typhoon, landslide, volcano, sandstorm, tsunami, and debris flow-share a common economic target domain and show economic recession. Additionally, corpus-based research has revealed that the landslide frame is the most salient in figuratively representing economic declines. An experimental study derived from the corpus analysis has found that the landslide-framed economic crises posed more severity to participants and exerted a notable influence on their opinions and judgments. Therefore, when effective communication of economic hazards is to be realized, metaphorical representation of economic crises demands great consideration.

Exploring metaphor's communicative effects in reasoning on vaccination

INTRODUCTION

The paper investigates the impact of the use of metaphors in reasoning tasks concerning vaccination, especially for defeasible reasoning cases. We assumed that both metaphor and defeasible reasoning can be relevant to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon, by anticipating possible defeating conditions.

METHODS

We hypothesized that extended metaphor could improve both the argumentative and the communicative effects of the message. We designed an empirical study to test our main hypotheses: participants (N = 196, 78% females; Meanage = 27.97 years, SDage = 10.40) were presented with a text about vaccination, described in either literal or metaphorical terms, based on uncertain vs. safe reasoning scenarios.

RESULTS

The results of the study confirmed that defeasible reasoning is relevant for the communicative impact of a text and that an extended metaphor enhances the overall communicative effects of the message, in terms of understandability, persuasion, perceived safety, and feeling of control over the health situation, collective trust in expertise and uptake of experts' advice. However, the results show that this effect is significantly nuanced by the type of defeasible reasoning, especially in the case of participants' trust in expertise and commitment to experts' advice.

CONCLUSION

Both communicative and defeasible reasoning competences are needed to enhance trust in immunization, with possible different outcomes at an individual and collective level.