Abstract
According to affect control theory (ACT), individuals define situations on the basis of their community’s “theory of people”, and social organization emerges as the individuals affirm their sentiments about their identities and other categorizations through interpersonal actions. Emotions enable sensing, communicating about, and control of the resulting social relationships. We update ACT’s framework on emotions and expand the model in the following ways. First, we propose that emotional processes differ for stigmatized identities as compared to socially valued ones. Second, we propose that the characteristic emotion occurring when an identity is confirmed perfectly serves as the emotion norm for that identity. Third, we show how ACT contributes to the study of emotion management. Fourth, we discuss emotion stations—the relatively stable locations in the affective space associated with self-identities. Finally, we suggest that unnamable, ineffable emotions are integral parts of people’s experience. Implications for future and interdisciplinary research are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
We are grateful to Neil MacKinnon, Tobias Schröder, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Jan Stets for helping us expand our coverage of affect control theory’s approach to emotions.
- 2.
Throughout this chapter, we report female EPA sentiments based on a survey conducted at Indiana University, 2002–2004 (Francis and Heise 2006), and affective processes based on female impression-formation equations derived in 2011 from data collected at the University of North Carolina, 1978. We often refer to results obtained with Interact, the computer program based on affect control theory that can be used to simulate many aspects of social interaction, including emotional responses (Heise 1995). A manual (Heise 2014) explicates Interact and provides many example analyses.
- 3.
Some scholars have discussed emotion norms associated with particular settings such as work (Wharton 2009), home (DeVault 1991), or school (Jackson 2013). Affect control theory can incorporate settings into the composition of social actions, and it may be possible thereby to predict emotion norms for settings, especially if combined with interactant identities that institutionally match the setting—e.g., worshippers in a church.
- 4.
The Euclidean distance between two profiles is ‘‘the square root of the sum of squared differences on each of the EPA dimensions’’ (Heise 2007, p. 146).
- 5.
“Facial expressions are formed from the EPA profile computed for an individual’s emotion, according to the following rules: (a) open eyes with positive activity; (b) arch up brow with positive evaluation; (c) raise brow with negative potency, lower brow with positive potency; (d) move mouth higher with positive potency, and move upper lip higher with positive potency; (e) drop lower lip and narrow mouth with positive activity; (f) curve lips up with positive evaluation, down with negative evaluation.” (Heise, 2007, p. 140).
- 6.
The 2004 sentiment associated with flight attendant is a bit nicer and notably less active than the sentiment for flight attendant in 1978 (1.79 0.53 0.62 versus 1.40 0.48 1.33, female sentiments). Thereby the feeling norm (characteristic emotion) for a contemporary flight attendant is feeling contented or charmed, rather than delight and elation.
- 7.
Alito is second from left in the photo published at www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/4311877812/.
- 8.
See the photo published in The Economist April 13, 2013, at www.economist.com/news/europe/21576155-vladimir-putin-comes-under-fire-abroad-repressive-laws-home-put-his-place.
- 9.
Readers should consult the Rogers, Schröder, & von Scheve (2014) article for references to the various theories of emotion construction.
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Lively, K., Heise, D. (2014). Emotions in Affect Control Theory. In: Stets, J., Turner, J. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions: Volume II. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9130-4_4
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