This study examines how emotionally ambivalent framing—simultaneously using both positive and negative emotional terms to frame ideas—affects audiences’ evaluative processes. Integrating insights from emotional ambivalence and social evaluation research, we argue that two factors moderate the effectiveness of an emotionally ambivalent framing strategy: idea atypicality and speaker fame. Using data from 3,284 TED Talks, we find that emotionally ambivalent framing enhances idea receptivity, but only for typical ideas. For atypical ideas, emotionally ambivalent framing tends to induce cognitive inflexibility, reducing the audience's ability to appreciate them. However, our analysis also reveals that speaker fame moderates this relationship. Specifically, when famous speakers present atypical ideas using emotionally ambivalent framing, the audience experiences reduced psychological discomfort, enabling ambivalence to facilitate a greater appreciation of these ideas. Our findings contribute to framing research by integrating the emotional dimension into the cognitive one, enriching social evaluation scholarship by exploring the interplay of the language, content, and speaker of a message, and advance ambivalence studies by identifying key boundary conditions, and enriching social evaluation scholarship by exploring the interplay of the language, content, and speaker of a message.
