Comparing the Emotional Impact of Thematic Versus Episodic Framing in Visualization Text
For visualization designers and researchers, this work highlights emotion as an underexplored dimension of textual framing effects, though the findings are incremental as they apply known framing strategies from political communication to a new context.
This paper investigates how episodic vs. thematic textual framing in data visualizations affects viewers' emotional responses. An experiment (N=800) found that episodic framing elicited significantly more negative emotional valence than thematic framing, and this negative emotion indirectly predicted greater support for gun control.
Although textual framing in data visualizations is known to influence comprehension, recall, and perceptions of bias, its effects on viewers' emotional responses remain underexplored. Drawing on two widely studied framing strategies in political communication, we examine how episodic framing (foregrounding a specific event) versus thematic framing (foregrounding broader trends) affects emotional and attitudinal responses to visualizations. We conducted a preregistered, between-subjects online experiment (N = 800) in which participants viewed identical visualizations of U.S. mass shooting data that varied only in textual framing: a thematic title, a thematic title with annotation, or an episodic title paired with the same annotation. Results show that episodic framing elicited significantly more negative emotional valence than both thematic conditions. In contrast, adding an annotation to a thematic title did not alter emotional impact. While framing did not significantly affect policy attitudes, mediation analysis revealed a significant indirect effect: increased negative emotion under episodic framing predicted greater support for gun control. These findings position emotion as a critical, yet underexamined, dimension of how textual framing shapes responses to data visualizations.