Marking the beginning of three days of exciting interdisciplinary exchanges on a large range of topics relevant to the Valence Asymmetries project, a pre-conference workshop was held in Sala Nau, UPF, on 18 March 2026.

The first talk, by project member Michelle Stanković (in collaboration with Morgan Moyer and Isidora Stojanovic), entitled "Valence Asymmetries in Moral Dilemmas" presented on-going research conducted by the team. The starting point for this research was a purported valence asymmetry in how folks judge morality: in Goodwin & Darley (2012), they write: "we find that beliefs about the moral properties of negatively valenced acts are seen as reliably more objective than beliefs about the moral properties of positively valenced acts."

The pilot studies that we conducted, however, have failed to replicate the asymmetry. For one thing, the ealier studies conflated the moral vocabulary "wrong vs. right" and "bad vs. good" while ours carefully controlled for that, and, perhaps even more importantly, the stimuli in the earlier studies were not matched for valence, while ours were. Dr. Stanković's talk was received with tremendous enthusiasm and gave rise to vivid discussion.

Followed the talk by invited speaker Saif M. Mohammad entitled "Mapping the Emotional and Social Dimensions of Language: The Next Generation of NRC Lexicons": for more detail, see this news item.

After the lunch break, Eirini Sossidi, currently a research fellow at Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin, and a prospective future member of the team, gave a talk entitled "Hyperbole and understatement as alternative politeness strategies".

Sossidi presented results from recently conducted studies that look at how the status of the speaker and the hearer impact the understanding of rhetorical figures such as hyperbole and understatement. Sossidi' research comes from the field of experimental pragmatics, and employs empirical methodology to shed new light on the way people use language in social contexts.  

The pre-conference workshop ended with the talk "The Valence Prominency Hypothesis" by project member Morgan Moyer and longterm collaborator Anouch Bourmayan, from Sorbonne University. 

Prof. Bourmayan and Dr. Moyer presented a series of experimental studies (conducted in collaboration with Brent Strickland, from Jean-Nicod Institute in Paris, and Isidora Stojanovic) which look at how valence compares to four other informational domains fundamental to development and cognition: the animate/inanimate distinction, the concrete/abstract distinction, the psychological/physical distinction, and the noun/verb distinction. Crucially, their studies show that valence is much more prominent than linguistic and philosophical theories have traditionally assumed. 

In sum, the pre-conference workshop was an excellent prelude to the exciting and stimulating First Valence Asymmetries Conference, which consitutes the first major international event organized by our project.