Valence Asymmetries

An asymmetric behavior between the positive and the negative has been evidenced in psychology, for information processing, attention, recognition and decision making, in philosophy, for judgments about morality and intentionality, and in linguistics, for a large range of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena. Negative information grabs our attention, we process it more carefully, we recall it with greater precision. We easily blame others for the negative side-effects of their actions, but do not praise them for the positive ones. It takes many nice words to overthrow one nasty remark. Valence asymmetries have arisen on many horizons but have seldom been brought into correspondence, and are at odds with most theories of value. The present project is a pioneering attempt to secure the premises for a cross-fertilization between the different accounts of valence asymmetries. It deploys methods from philosophy (argumentation and conceptual analysis), formal semantic and value-theoretic models, and experimental methodology from psycholinguistics and moral psychology.

The project is closely connected to the Slurring Terms across Languages (STAL) international interdisciplinary network that the project PI, Isidora Stojanovic, co-coordinates with Dan Zeman (University of Porto).

ERC Advanced Grant, grant agreement n° 101142133