Framing effects research addresses how frames in the news media affect cognitions, attitudes, and preferences. A growing amount of research is devoted to the question which individual and contextual variables can enhance, limit or obliterate framing effects. However, the fundamental question whether framing effects may vary depending on the particular issue at stake has not been addressed. Base...

Issue frames in policy discourse and news reporting regularly influence citizens’ political opinions. Yet, we only have a limited understanding of how and among whom these framing effects occur. I propose a dual-process model of issue framing effects arguing that we must understand mediators of framing (the how question) in connection with individual-level moderators of framing (the whom questi...

Framing—portraying an issue from one perspective to the necessary exclusion of alternative perspectives—is a central concept in political communication. It is also a powerful political tool, as evidenced through experiments and single-issue studies beyond the lab. Yet compared to its significance, we know very little about framing as a generalizable phenomenon. Do framing dynamics, such as the ...

We use an experiment built into a series of surveys of Iowa voters during the 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign to test the effect of differing group framing labels on immigration policy preferences. We find that certain framing labels matter, but only among Republican partisans for whom the immigration issue is important. We also find that issue importance produces more conservative policy preferences...

Laboratory studies frequently find that framing changes individual issue positions. But few real world studies have demonstrated framing induced shifts in aggregate political opinions, let alone political identities. One explanation for these divergent findings is that the competitive nature of most real world political debates presents multiple frames that cancel each other out. We assess this...

Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, e.g., biotechnology, climate change, and more recently, geoengineering. The reporter’s framing of the issue is likely to influence readers’ perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, fo...

Two studies examined the influence of transient affective states and issue framing on issue interpretation and risk taking within the context of strategic decision making. In Study 1, participants in whom transient positive or negative affective states were induced by reading a short story showed systematic differences in issue interpretation and risk taking in a strategic decision making conte...