Mixed feelings, mixed outcomes? When emotionally ambivalent framing enhances idea appreciation

Abstract

Despite growing interest in how linguistic strategies shape audience responses to innovative ideas, prior evidence on the benefits of using emotional language remains mixed. Building on research on emotional ambivalence and social evaluation, we introduce the concept of emotionally ambivalent framing (i.e., the combination of positive and negative emotional language when presenting ideas) and investigate its effects on audience evaluation. Analyzing data from 3284 TED Talks, we find that emotionally ambivalent framing increases receptivity, but only for typical ideas. For atypical ideas, instead, such framing tends to undermine the audience's appreciation. However, we show that speakers' fame mitigates this effect, enabling emotionally ambivalent framing to serve as an effective communicative strategy for atypical ideas as well. These findings advance our understanding of the interplay between emotions and cognition in shaping the effectiveness of linguistic framing, contributing to research on entrepreneurship, ambivalence, and social evaluation.