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, behaviors, settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have been constructed with ratings of respondents from the US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, and China (both the People's Republic and Taiwan).

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.

A social action creates impressions of the actor, the object person, the behavior, and the setting.

Deflections are the distances in the EPA space between transient and fundamental affective meanings. For example, a mother complimented by a stranger feels that the unknown individual is much nicer than a stranger is supposed to be, and a bit too potent and active as well – thus there is a moderate distance between the impression created and the mother's sentiment about strangers. High deflections in a situation produce an aura of unlikeliness or uncanniness. It is theorized that high deflections maintained over time generate psychological stress.

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