Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 1062 3 of 22
reports, the environment, and science [13]. Some respondents even hold the belief that global warming
results in climate change [9].
The two distinct climate discourses being produced based on the same reality can be explained
by the framing theory in communication study. Framing refers to the phenomenon where the reality
is always partially selected or highlighted when described by the public or media [19]. By distinctly
deﬁning problems, suggesting solutions, and indicating casual interpretations [20], diﬀerent frames
tell the audience diﬀerent stories and inﬂuence how they observe facts [21,22]. Two types of frames,
equivalency frames and emphasis frames, are commonly studied by scholars to examine how framing
eﬀects inﬂuence individuals’ attitudes and beliefs [23]. Equivalency frames describe the same fact or
logic with diﬀerent words and may suggest that the audience perceives facts in psychologicallydiﬀerent
ways [ 24]. For example, a cup can be described as “half full” and “half empty”, where the former
is a positive frame indicating a reference point lower than current status, and the latter is negative,
meaning that the reference point is above the current situation [25]. Emphasis frames employ words
selectively associated with parts of reality to shift the audience’s attention to particular attributes [26].
Climate change and global warming have been noted to highlight di ﬀerent aspects of an issue by
activating distinct cognitive accessibility patterns [27].
Diﬀerent frames concerning the global climate concern are popular among the public, politicians,
environmentalists, and the media [1,28,29]. Big data analyses have indicated that when interpreting
climate events, individuals’ preference for frameworks was inﬂuenced by demographics [ 5] and
social-political background [2]. Di ﬀerent choices of frameworks can evoke di ﬀerent psychological
processes [30], promote or inhibit engagement intentions [31], or gain approval on various levels [ 32].
Studies have noted that the frameworks of climate change and global warming may result from
diﬀerent political indications. The American Republican-leaning states show more preference for
global warming than climate change compared with Democratic-leaning states, and global warming is
more connected with “hoax” in questioning the reality of the global climate issue [5]. Conservatives
are more likely to link heat-related phenomena to global warming, whereas liberals associate these
facts equally with both frames [27]. An earlier survey conducted by [4] argued that wording choice
might not inﬂuence the whole population similarly. For the whole sample and politically independent
individuals, the two terminologies were equally serious, but climate change seemed more serious
compared with global warming among the Republicans, and the Democrats held the opposite opinion.
2.2. Network Model for Cognition
Diﬀerent framework choices may create even more diﬀerences than have already been noticed.
Psychologists think that human beings are a collection of learned associations [33], and associative
response rather than simply linear logic form the structural basis of thought [ 34]. Associative
learning [35] is a long-standing assumption underlying cognitive science [14], suggesting that human
cognition toward the world forms a network pattern, where the world is organized into several groups
of related items and stored in a network model in the mind. When messages are processed by humans,
they are ﬁrst encoded into a temporary memory network and then linked to an existing associative
memory network for long-term storage [ 36]. In the network, a node represents a certain concept,
and edges refers to particular relationships, such as time sequences [ 37], similarity [38], semantic
connections [37], or cause and eﬀect [33] between two nodes.
When individuals search their memory for a particular piece of a message in their mind,