This study explored the relationship between media representation of foreign countries and social distances toward those countries, focusing on psychological distance. Research on the construal-level theory has shown that as psychological distance in terms of time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality increases, the level of construal becomes abstract and vice versa. Moreover, according to the linguistic category model, adjectives are more abstract than verbs concerning linguistic abstraction. News reports the actual events of the day. Additionally, the spatial distance between Japan and a specific foreign country is usually constant. Assuming that the distances in time, space, and hypotheticality are constant to some extent, social distance toward a country would lead to more abstract language expression. This study targets the sentences with China and the United States as the subjects extracted from newspaper articles appearing on the front pages in the morning papers from 1991 to 2020 (N=865). Further, the annual national survey data regarding familiarities with these countries was collected from the Japanese Cabinet Office's homepage. The results of this study showed that the average number of adjectives per year in sentences about the United States was more than that of China. Nonetheless, no such difference was seen for verbs, and that there was no relationship between familiarities and appearance rate of adjectives and verbs in both countries. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the average valences of adjectives from sentences about China and those from sentences about the United States. The results of this study are also discussed.
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