Affect Control Theory

Affect control theory links social identities, actions, and emotions in a control system. In a control system, the processes operate to maintain a reference level (like a thermostat setting). In affect control theory, the reference levels are the affective meanings that are linked to labels for identities and actions. People learn these meanings (how good, how powerful, and how active things are) from their cultures. When they enter social interactions, they define situations with verbal labels, such as “I'm a teacher, and the person entering my office is an undergraduate student.” The act of thinking about the situation in that way automatically evokes meanings about what teachers and undergraduate students are like on the three dimensions of goodness, powerfulness, and activity levels. The basic principle of affect control is that people expect, enact, and interpret actions that will maintain these culturally given meanings for the social identities and actions that occur in the situation. David R. Heise developed the theory from Charles Osgood's work on the semantic differential as a method for measuring affective meanings, from Harry Gollob's research on impression formation, and from William T. Power's control theory of perception.

The maintenance of meaning is what makes affect control theory a control system: The culturally learned meanings are stable aspects of how we think about our social world, and [Page 4]they act as a reference level for interpreting what happens in social interactions. Events that occur can disturb the way people seem at any given moment (e.g., we can judge that the undergraduate student is lying to us, something we would not expect an occupant of a fundamentally good, slightly weak, very lively identity to do). When interactions are disturbed by events that don't maintain their cultural identity meanings, people tend to do things in ways that restore those meanings. So, a professor who thinks a student is lying to her might create a new event, such as “the professor challenges the student” that, when comprehended, would restore a sense that the student and professor were acting in ways that were expected or right. The theory does not require that this process be conscious: The professor may not be aware of trying to restore his or her identity and that of the student. But the action that will produce restoration is the predicted one.

If a new event cannot be enacted to restore their and others' identities, actors may instead change the way they are thinking about the situation in order to have the social interaction make sense. For example, if we see a news story that a priest has molested a child, this event is very hard to reconcile with our cultural meanings of priests as good, powerful, quiet people and children as good, weak, and lively. The mathematical equations (estimated from people's reactions to many different events) that form the empirical base of affect control theory tell us that good people are very unlikely to do very bad things to other good people. Such events cause massive changes in our impressions about the people involved (making us think that the priest is a much nastier, weaker, more active person than we expect priests to be, among other things). Since we cannot respond behaviorally to such an event, we are likely to try to find cognitive ways of dealing with it by redefining the situation. If the facts are ambiguous, a reader might assume that the action never happened and that the priest is being framed or persecuted. If the action is well anchored in the account, we may hold the parts of the event that we are sure of as given (the child and the molestation) and ask ourselves, “What kind of a person would do such an act?” The theory can model the construction of this new identity. Concretely, affect control theory uses mathematical equations to solve for the three-dimensional profile (of goodness, powerfulness, and activity) that would fit such an event. Such processing would produce an identity more like rapist or fiend than priest. So, when events occur that do not allow behavioral action to restore identity and action meanings, people relabel the situation instead. They come to see the actions in a different light (It wasn't a lie, it was just a misunderstanding) or label people with new identities (He's not a priest, he's a fiend). The theory views social actors as composites of many identities, one of which may be highlighted in a given situation because of institutional or affective constraints.

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