Abstract
Previous research shows that social desirability for fictive character is judged higher when negative traits are mentioned in clause with adversative conjunction (e.g., "Although Kazuya pretends to know, he is less greed") than when with co-conjunction. The different evaluation was considered to stem from some differences of discourse focus because the critical traits were identical among sentences with the different conjunctions. The present research investigates the evaluation of the traits which are mentioned in adversative clause in order to clarify the characteristics of the effect of discourse focus. Participants were required to rate the desirability of specific traits of fictive character, rather than the whole person. The experimental results showed that neither negative nor positive traits were judged higher when using adversative expression. On the other hand, there were an effect of order of mention for the traits, the latter traits being more biased toward their valence.
