Sociologist Erving Goffman (1969) argued that people conduct themselves so as to generate impressions that maintain the identities, or faces, that they have in social situations. Human action--aside from accomplishing tasks--functions expressively in reflecting actors' social positions and in preserving social understandings. Affect control theory (Heise, 1979; Smith-Lovin and Heise, 1988; MacKinnon, forthcoming) continues Goffman's thesis, providing a mathematized and empirically-grounded model for explaining and predicting expressive aspects of action.
Cross-cultural research among people speaking diverse languages in more than twenty-five nations around the world (Osgood, May, and Miron, 1975) revealed that any person, behavior, object, setting, or property of persons evokes an affective response consisting of three components.
One component consists of approval or disapproval of the entity--an evaluation based on morality (good versus bad), aesthetics (beautiful versus ugly), functionality (useful versus useless), hedonism (pleasant versus unpleasant), or some other criterion. Whatever the primary basis of evaluation, it tends to generalize to other bases, so, for example, something that is useful tends also to seem good, beautiful, and pleasant.
Another component of affective responses is a potency assessment made in terms of physical proportions (large versus small, deep versus shallow), strength (strong versus weak), forcefulness (powerful versus powerless), or other criteria. Again, judgments on one criterion tend to generalize to other criteria, so, for example, a powerful person seems large, deep (in a metaphorical sense), and strong.
The third component of affective responses--an appraisal of activity--may depend on speed (fast versus slow), perceptual stimulation (noisy versus quiet, bright versus dim), age (young versus old), keenness (sharp versus dull), or other criteria. These criteria also generalize to some degree so, for example, a young person often seems metaphorically fast, noisy, bright, and sharp.
The Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (EPA) structure in subjective responses is one of the best documented facts in social science, and an elaborate technology has developed for measuring EPA responses on "semantic differential scales" (Heise, 1969). The scales consist of adjectives separated by a number of check positions. For example, a standard scale has Good-Nice at one end and Bad-Awful at the other end, and intervening positions on the scale allow respondents to record the direction and intensity of their evaluations of a stimulus. The middle rating position on such scales represents neutrality.
EPA responses tend to be socially shared within a population (Heise, 1966), so a group's average EPA response to an entity indexes the group sentiment about the entity. Sentiments vary across cultures. For example, potent authorities such as an employer are evaluated positively in U.S. and Canadian college populations, but German students evaluate authorities negatively; small children are evaluated positively in Western nations but neutrally in Japan.
Combinations of cognitive elements bring affective meanings together and create outcome impressions through psychological processes that are complex, subtle, and yet highly predictable (Averett and Heise, 1987; Anderson, 1981).
For example, among U.S. college students (the population of raters for examples henceforth), someone who is rich is evaluatively neutral, very powerful, and a little on the quiet side. Meanwhile, a professor is fairly good, fairly powerful, and a bit quiet. The notion of a "rich professor" combines these sentiments and yields a different outcome. A rich professor is evaluated somewhat negatively, mainly because the personalized power of wealth generates an uneasiness that is not overcome by esteem for academic status. A rich professor seems very powerful because the average potency of wealth and of professors is high, and the mind adds an extra increment of potency because of the personalized power deriving from wealth. A rich professor seems even quieter than the component statuses because activity connotations do not merely average, they summate to some degree.
The processes that are involved in combining a social identity with a status characteristic like "rich" also are involved in combining a social identity with personal traits. Thus, an authoritarian professor evokes an impression roughly similar to a rich professor since the affective association for authoritarian is similar to that for rich.
Another example involving emotion illustrates additional processes involved in combining personal characteristics with social identities (Heise and Thomas, 1989). Being outraged implies that one is feeling quite bad, somewhat potent, and somewhat lively. A child is felt to be quite good, quite impotent, and very active. The combination, "outraged child", seems fairly bad, partly because the child is flaunting personalized power deriving from an emotion and partly because the mind discounts customary esteem for a person in the presence of a particularized basis for negative evaluation--the child's negative emotion undercuts the regard one usually has for a child. The child's impotency is reduced because of a bad and potent emotional state. And the child's activity is greater than usual because the activity of the emotion and the activity of the identity combine additively.
The above illustrations focus on combinations of individual properties with social identities. Events are another basis for impression formation. A social event--an actor behaving on an object person within some setting--amalgamates EPA impressions of the elements comprising the event and generates a new impression of each element (Heise, 1979; Smith-Lovin, 1987a; Smith-Lovin, 1987b).
The character of a behavior diffuses to the actor who performs the behavior to a degree: for example, an admired person who engages in a violent act seems less good, more potent, and more active than usual. Impressions of the actor also are influenced by complex interplays between the nature of the behavior and the nature of the object. For example, violence toward an enemy is not nearly so damaging to an actor as violence toward a child. That is because bad, forceful behaviors toward bad, potent objects seem justified while such behaviors toward good, weak objects seem ruthless. Moreover, the degree of justification or of ruthlessness depends on how good the actor was in the first place; for example, a person who acts violently toward a child loses more respect if initially esteemed than if already stigmatized.
Similar processes of diffusion from one event element to another and of complex interplays between event elements influence impressions of behaviors, objects, and settings. The general principle is that initial affective meanings of event elements combine and thereby produce impressions that reflect the meaning of the event. Those impressions are transient because they, in turn, are the meanings that are transformed by later events.
Normal events produce transient impressions that match sentiments, whereas events that generate impressions deviating widely from sentiments seem abnormal or anomalous (Heise and MacKinnon, 1987). For example, "a parent assisting a child" creates impressions of parent, child, and assisting that are close to sentiments provided by our culture, and the event seems normal. On the other hand, "a parent harming a child" seems abnormal because the event produces negative impressions of parent and child that are far different than the culturally-given notions that parents and children are good.
According to affect control theory, people manage events so as to match transient impressions with sentiments and thereby maintain normality in their experience. Expressive shaping of events occurs along with rational assembly of orderly action, and ordinarily the expressive and the rational components of action complement each other because cultural sentiments incite the very events that are required by the logic of social institutions like the family, law, religion, etc.
Having adopted an appropriate identity at a scene and having cast others in complementary identities, a person intuits behaviors that will create normal impressions. For example, if a person in the role of judge is to act on someone who is a proven crook, then she must do something that confirms a judge's power and that confirms the badness of a crook, and behaviors like "convict" and "sentence" produce the right impressions. Fitting behaviors may change in the wake of prior events. For example, a father who is fulfilling his role in a mediocre manner because his child has disobeyed him strives to regain goodness and power by controlling the child or by dramatizing forgiveness. Other's identities may serve as resources for restoring a compromised identity (Wiggins and Heise, 1987); for example, a father shaken by a child's disobedience might recover his poise by supporting and defending mother.
Behaviors that confirm sentiments are the intrinsically motivated behaviors in a situation. Actors sometimes forego impulses to such behaviors in compliance to the demands of others, but compliance also reflects the basic principle since normal behavior in one relationship simultaneously can be abnormal behavior in another relationship. For example, a child acts normally when calling on a playmate though also abnormally if his mother has ordered him not to do so and he disobeys her. The actor maintains the relationship that is most salient.
Sometimes other people produce events that do not confirm sentiments evoked by one's own definition of a situation. Affect control theory suggests several routes for restoring consistency between impressions and sentiments in such cases. First, people may try to re-interpret other's actions so as to optimize expressive coherence. For example, an actor's movement away from another person can be viewed as departing, leaving, escaping, fleeing, deserting--and one chooses the interpretation that seems most normal, given participants' identities and prior events (Heise, 1979). Of course, interpretations of a behavior are bound by determinable facts about the behavior and its consequences, so some behaviors cannot be interpreted in a way that completely normalizes an event.
Another response to disturbing events is construction of new events that transform abnormal impressions back to normality. Restorative events with the self as actor might be feasible and enacted, as in the example of a father controlling a disobedient child. Restorative events that require others to act might be elicited by suggesting what the other should do. For example, after a child has disobeyed his mother, a father might tell the child to apologize.
Intractable disturbances in interaction that cannot be handled by re-interpreting others' actions or by instigating new events lead to more fundamental efforts to achieve expressive coherence, such as attributing character traits to people in order to form complex identities that account for participation in certain kinds of anomalous events. For example, a father who has neglected his child might be viewed as an inconsiderate person.
Changing base identities also can produce the kind of person who would participate in certain events. For example, an employee cheating an employer would be expressively coherent were the employee known to be a law-breaker, and a cheating incident may instigate work to apply the law-breaker label and to withdraw the employee identity.
Trait attributions and labels that normalize particular incidents are added to conceptions of people, and thereafter the special identities may be invoked in order to set expectations for a person's behavior in other scenes or to understand other incidents. Everyone who interacts with a person builds up knowledge about the person's capacities in this way, and a person builds up knowledge about the self in this way as well.
Affect control theory is a central framework in the sociology of emotions (Thoits, 1989). According to affect control theory, spontaneous emotion reflects the state a person has reached as a result of events and also how that state compares to the ideal experience of a person with a particular social identity. For example, if events make a person seem neutral on goodness, potency, and activity then the tendency is to feel emotionally neutral, but someone in the sweetheart role ends up feeling blue because he or she is experiencing so much less than one expects in a romantic relationship.
Since emotions reflect the impressions that events have generated, they are a way of directly sensing the consequences of social interaction. Since emotions simultaneously reflect what kinds of identities people are taking, emotions also are a way of sensing the operative social structure in a situation. Moreover, because displays of emotion broadcast a person's subjective appraisals to others, emotions contribute to intersubjective sharing of views about social matters.
People sometimes mask their emotions or display emotions other than those that they feel spontaneously in order to hide their appraisal of events from others or to conceal personal definitions of a situation. Such "emotion work" often occurs when situations intermingle, as when one has an institutional definition of a situation and also a personal definition. Institutional identities invest actors with the responsibility of maintaining the institutional ideology through conduct and through emotional displays, and therefore actors may be obligated to display emotions that are unauthentic by personal definitions.
Emotion work also occurs after abnormal events. For example, an actor caught in misconduct might display guilt and remorse beyond what is felt in order to convince others that he believes his behavior is wrong and that he is not the type who engages in such activity. Heise (1989) showed that this kind of emotion work can be derived from the mathematics of affect control theory.
Overall, affect control theory provides a comprehensive social psychological framework relating to roles, impression formation, behavior, emotion, attribution, labeling, and other issues (Stryker and Statham, 1985). Quantitative predictions about EPA outcomes are based on impression-formation equations that have been verified cross-culturally. The model is concrete and precise enough that a computer program (Heise and Lewis, 1988) has been built to simulate social interactions--and all of the examples in this report are results from the program. Simulations can be conducted with existing EPA measurements obtained in a variety of nations--U.S.A., Northern Ireland, Canada, Germany, Japan; and small data sets can be integrated with existing databases in order to simulate interactions in subcultures (Smith-Lovin and Douglas, forthcoming). Thus, the theory and its instrumentation provide sociologists with useful tools for studying social relations.