Affective Framing and Consumer Protection: Feelings and Emotions in Green Mortgage and Real-Estate Loan Offers

Abstract

The paper examines the role of affective appeals in mortgage advertising, with particular focus on “green” mortgages. Using a corpus of European banking advertisements and computational tools (emotion lexicons, transformer models, topic modelling), the study finds that green mortgage offers exhibit a consistently more positive and anticipatory emotional valence than standard mortgages. This difference is not due solely to ecological vocabulary, but to broader discursive choices that may influence consumers’ epistemic vigilance. The results are discussed in relation to the EU regulatory framework on fair information practices and consumer protection.