The Promotion of a Bright Future and the Prevention of a Dark Future: Time Anchored Incitements in News Articles and Facebook's Status Updates

By Danilo GarciaKarl DrejingClara AmatoMichal KosinskiSverker Sikstrom
Frontiers in Psychology
September132018 Vol. 9

Research suggests that humans have the tendency to increase the valence of events when these are imagined to happen in the future, but to decrease the valence when the same events are imagined to happen in the past. This line of research, however, has mostly been conducted by asking participants to value imagined, yet probable, events. Our aim was to re-examine this time-valence asymmetry using real-life data: a Reuter’s news and a Facebook status updates corpus.