Language for Winning Hearts and Minds: Verb Aspect in U.S. Presidential Campaign Speeches for Engaging Emotion.

How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment of mental states in message recipients. Consequently, we predicted that emotion-inducing language should be found in speeches specifically designed to create audience alignment - stump speeches of United States presidential candidates. We focused on phrases in the past imperfective verb aspect ("a bad economy was burdening us") that leave a mental simulation of the language content open-ended, and thus unconstrained, relative to past perfective sentences ("we were burdened by a bad economy"). As predicted, imperfective phrases appeared more frequently in stump versus comparison speeches, relative to perfective phrases. In a subsequent experiment, participants rated phrases from presidential speeches as more emotionally intense when written in the imperfective aspect compared to the same phrases written in the perfective aspect, particularly for sentences perceived as negative in valence. These findings are consistent with the notion that emotions have a role in constraining the comprehension of language, a role that may be used in communication with large audiences.

Improving tobacco-free advocacy on college campuses: a novel strategy to aid in the understanding of student perceptions about policy proposals.

OBJECTIVE: Tobacco-control policy proposals are usually met with opposition on college campuses. Research to understand students' viewpoints about health-related policy proposals and messaging strategies, however, does not exist. This study investigated students' perceptions about a smoke-free policy proposal to help understand their positions of support and opposition and to inform the development of effective messaging strategies. PARTICIPANTS: In January 2012, 1,266 undergraduate students from a midwestern university completed an online questionnaire about smoke-free campus policies. METHODS: Responses were coded and analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software and chi-square, independent-samples t tests, and binary logistic models. RESULTS: Most students who supported a smoke-free policy considered environmental or aesthetic conditions, whereas most opponents used personal freedom frames of thought. Supporters viewed smoking policies in personal terms, and opponents suggested means-ends policy reasoning. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, points of reference and emotions about proposed policies provided insight about participants' perspectives to help inform effective policy advocacy efforts.