Page 108 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 101

or a negative frame; it plays a far more important role in that it modifies
the cognitive process of experiencing a given event and its persuasive
power (see Albarracín & Kumkale, 2003; Forgas, 2008). Therefore, one
can state that the increased alertness in experiencing the argumentation
presented in a negative frame is caused by the arousal of negative affect.
This is an intuitively unquestionable claim; unless the negative message
fails to cause anxiety, its persuasive appeal should not exceed the appeal of
the positive message, the content of which does not evoke negative affect.
This relatively complex psychological process, which activates the in-
terdependencies between cognition, motivation, and affect, helps explain
the mechanism of the gradable persuasive appeal of the information pre-
sented by means of negative or positive framing. If any of these elements
is missing, the persuasive effect is undermined completely. Figure 4.2
presents a schema of the causal process of evoking the argumentative ap-
peal in negative framing.
Arceneaux (2012) examined the involvement of activated affect in the
creation of the persuasive appeal of information presented in a positive or
a negative frame. In his analyses, he presented a genuine merger of theo-
retical approaches proposed within neurobiology and political psychology,
on the basis of which he explains the differences in argumentation appeal
used in political communication. To date, the research on anxiety caused
by the anticipated experience of loss has proved that when faced with such
a situation, people undertake actions to minimize loss, which calls for
increased alertness, conscious attention, and deliberate processing of per-
ceived arguments. The evolutionary process has led to the rise of

Figure 4.2 Framing and affect in controlling the persuasive appeal of the
message