Affect control theory

In control theory, affect control theory proposes that individuals maintain affective meanings through their actions and interpretations of events. The activity of social institutions occurs through maintenance of culturally based affective meanings. Besides a denotative meaning, every concept has an affective meaning, or connotation, that varies along three dimensions: evaluation – goodness versus badness, potency – powerfulness versus powerlessness, and activity – liveliness versus torpidity. Affective meanings can be measured with semantic differentials yielding a three-number profile indicating how the concept is positioned on evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). Osgood demonstrated that an elementary concept conveyed by a word or idiom has a normative affective meaning within a particular culture. A stable affective meaning derived either from personal experience or from cultural inculcation is called a sentiment, or fundamental affective meaning, in affect control theory. Affect control theory has inspired assembly of dictionaries of EPA sentiments for thousands of concepts involved in social life – identities, behaviours, settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have been constructed with ratings of respondents from the US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, China and Taiwan. Impression formation Each concept that is in play in a situation has a transient affective meaning in addition to an associated sentiment. The transient corresponds to an impression created by recent events. Events modify impressions on all three EPA dimensions in complex ways that are described with non-linear equations obtained through empirical studies. Here are two examples of impression-formation processes. An actor who behaves disagreeably seems less good, especially if the object of the behavior is innocent and powerless, like a child. A powerful person seems desperate when performing extremely forceful acts on another, and the object person may seem invincible.