Affect Control Theory

We examine three basic tropes-villain, victim, and hero-that emerge in images, claims, and narratives. We compare recent research on characters with the predictions of an established tradition, affect control theory (ACT). Combined, the theories describe core traits of the villain victim hero triad and predict audiences' reactions. Character theory (CT) can help us understand the cultural roots of evaluation, potency, and activity profiles and the robustness of profile ratings. It also provides nuanced information regarding multiplicity in, and sub-types of, characters and how characters work together to define roles. Character types can be strategically deployed in political realms, potentially guiding strategies, goals, and group dynamics. ACT predictions hold up well, but CT suggests several paths for extension and elaboration. In many cases, cultural research and social psychology work on parallel tracks, with little cross-talk. They have much to learn from each other.

Still in draft form and under construction, An Integral Theory of Cultural Evolution gathers evidence across the social, behavioral and biological sciences in search of Consilience, or the underlying unity of scientific knowledge. This study examines analytics from across these disciplines to examine the common thread binding Language, Interaction, Thought, and Emotion.

Affect Control Theory is presented as a validated model of social behavior underlying Social Interactionism and Self-making processes.  ACT's mathematized analytic models social action based upon semantic description of behavior in which EPA dimensions of affect are used to compute resultant social action and emotions.  ACT is posited as an exemplar analytic theory of the Social Sciences that could be used to validate an Integral Theory of the Social Affect System.

This study concludes by first offering a unifying Color Theory of Emotion which uses the analogy of color vision to the pattern that emerges from the Modes of Autonomic Control and Evaluative Space Model that integrates Emotion, Motivation and Attention/Perception psychological primitives.  This theory is then integrated with Power Status Theory of Emotion & Affect Spectrum Theory, through AST's mapping to Grid-Group Theory via Relational Model Theory.  This study then uses the Moral Motivations Model to integrate several competing analytcs in Moral Psychology, including Moral Foundations Theory, Schwartz Value Theory, and Morality as Cooperation, along with RMT.  PSToE & AST are then integrated with Moral Motivations and Relational Models over the Non-Zero-Sum Game Symmetrical Game space, ultimately describing hierarchic ontological integration of evaluation processes, revealing the role of emotions in decision-making under uncertainty that have evolved under multi-level selection.

The Development and subsequent have temporarily been removed and continue to be under construction.

Juvenile detention centres (JDC) are undoubtedly difficult environments for both detainees who live
and staff who work in these facilities. Being such a difficult environment,  the question arises as
to whether or not the physical environment actually does make a difference (Wortley, 2002;
Fairweather, 2000). In this study, Affect Control Theory (ACT) (Heise, 1979), a theory previously
not applied to Environment-Behavior (EB) research, was employed to investigate this question in JDC
residential units.

ACT is a dynamic framework for understanding, explaining and researching social behaviour and
experience in settings (Heise, 1979). People’s interactions with the environment are conceptualized
as a reciprocal process in which people perceive and maintain meanings in the world around them. In
this thesis the ACT framework was developed for the investigation of the influence of the physical
environment in situations. This development culminated in the ACT Conceptual Architecture (ACTCA)
(Lulham, 2006).

Detainee and staff participants in actual JDC facilities completed a questionnaire based on the ACT
methods and the ACTCA model in the presence of one of three simulated JDC residential units. The
interior of the JDC residential units were simulated using the Immersive Image- based Environment
approach (IIE). Previously not used in EB field, IIE approach facilitated a
360 degree photographic quality representation of a physical space. A propensity score approach was
used with the quasi-experimental design to enhance the equivalence of the treatment groups,
increasing the reliability of the research design.

Investigated through various ANOVA techniques, the results of the research were fascinating and
indicated various mechanisms through which physical design may influence the functioning of JDC
residential units. Differences in physical design influenced perceptions of people in the
situations to a greater extent than behavioural expectations. ACT and ACTCA model provided
informative frameworks through which to interpret the results. Informative to the design and
operation of JDC facilities, the results were also interpreted more broadly in terms of
correctional design and Affect Control Theory. A proposal was developed of how affective control in
physical setting may be conceptualized within the ACT framework; the Affective Control in Physical
Settings framework (ACTCA). ACT is identified as a relevant explanatory framework for investigating
social interaction in places, and the ACT Conceptual Architecture (Lulham, 2006) may facilitate the
application of the theory to investigations of the
influence of the physical environment in numerous research contexts.

Affect control theory is a theory of interaction that takes into account cultural meanings. Affect control research has previously considered interaction with technology, but there remains a lack of theorizing about inclusion of technology within the theory. This paper lays a foundation for an affect control theory of technology by addressing key assumptions, presenting an empirical foundation using a survey of sentiments toward technology, and analyzing those sentiments.

Affect control theory is a theory of interaction that takes into account cultural meanings. Affect control research has previously considered interaction with technology, but there remains a lack of theorizing about inclusion of technology within the theory. This paper lays a foundation for an affect control theory of technology by addressing key assumptions, presenting an empirical foundation using a survey of sentiments toward technology, and analyzing those sentiments. AFFECT CONTROL THEORY Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise 1979; Heise 2007) is a formal, mathematical theory modeled at the level of an observed-situation. There must an observer who is a member of a languageculture (Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2006:139). The observer labels the elements of the situation, including actors, behaviors, setting, and emotions. When labeling elements of a situation, an observer uses labels from her language-culture. These labels evoke affective sentiments that are fairly stable within a lang...

Sentiment Analysis, or the extraction of emotional content from text, has been a prominent research topic for a decade. Numerous annotated lexicons have been created for identification and classification of emotions (or affect) in text. This extraction of emotional content from text makes possible emotion-aware Information Retrieval, which is especially important with the growing popularity of user-generated content like blogs, tweets, and wikis. This paper introduces a new source of high quality manual annotations that can be used for sentiment extraction. A subfield of sociology symbolic interactionism, more precisely Affect Control Theory (ACT), measures the emotional meanings we associate with various concepts. Research in this field produces multi-dimensional manual annotations of words much like those used in Sentiment Analysis. We compare these annotations with SentiWordNet and WordNet-Affect, lexicons produced for Sentiment Analysis, in the task of text polarity classificati...

Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise 1979, 2007) states that people control social interactions by striving to maintain culturally shared feelings about the situation. The theory is based on mathematical models of language-based impression formation. In a laboratory experiment, we tested the predictive power of a new German-language ACT model with respect to actual behavior and felt emotions in leadership; 60 subjects managed a computer simulated company by communicating with 3 different virtual employees (within-subjects manipulation). Half of the subjects were primed with the concept of authoritarian leadership using a situational interview technique; the remainder was primed with the concept of democratic leadership (between-subjects manipulation). There were 14 dependent variables (leadership categories like praise, criticize, augment salary, etc.). The German impression-formation model correctly predicted 27 of 42 between-subjects contrasts (p < .05) and 56 of 84 within-subject...

ABSTRACT Affect control theory is a theory of interaction that takes into account cultural meanings. Affect control research has previously considered interaction with technology, but there remains a lack of theorizing about inclusion of technology within the theory. This paper lays a foundation for an affect control theory of technology by addressing key assumptions, presenting an empirical foundation using a survey of sentiments toward technology, and analyzing those sentiments.

In our investigation of emotion management in organizations, we shift the focus from leadership to followership. To maintain their leadership identity in leader–member relationships, leaders have to elicit emotions that are contingent on the identity of the member. As such, members play a key role in defining leadership. We apply the symbolic interactionist approach of affect control theory and its operationalization in computer simulations to investigate the emotion management of leaders. To do so, we determine which emotions are most normative for leaders to show during their interactions with members that assume identities as passive followers versus active colleagues. The results reveal that the identity of a passive follower elicits emotions that are relatively negative (e.g. defiant, mad, shocked, alarmed, anxious) from leaders, whereas the active colleague identity generates comparatively positive emotions (e.g. pleased, delighted, glad, amused, thankful, relaxed, serene).

This paper solves the output regulation problem of Sprott-F chaotic system, which is one of the classical chaotic systems discovered by J.C. Sprott (1994). Explicitly, for the constant tracking problem, new state feedback control laws have been derived for regulating the output of the Sprott-F chaotic system. Our controller design has been carried out using the regulator equations of C.I. Byrnes and A. Isidori (1990). The output regulation of the Sprott-F chaotic system has important applications in many areas of Science and Engineering. Numerical simulations are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the control schemes proposed in this paper for the output regulation of the Sprott-F chaotic system.

The current study tests the affect control theory of self, a mathematical theory that demonstrates a core social psychological principle: individuals strive for a stable and coherent self through identity selection and behavior. In the affect control theory of self, the self is conceptualized as self-sentiments, which are measured on three dimensions: evaluation (good/bad), potency (powerful/powerless), and activity (fast/slow). In a longitudinal sample of college men and women, I find the self-sentiment predicts how individuals describe themselves on a range of terms, including primary emotions and both stigmatized and esteemed traits related to mental illness and self-esteem. It also predicts various productive and deviant behaviors five months later. Thus, the current study demonstrates the theoretical precision of the theory, its ability for understanding human behavior, and its potential for identifying at-risk individuals.

ABSTRACT We use affect control theory (ACT) to test the veracity of mathematically derived predictions that an exotic dancer will act in ways that are consistent with societal expectations for her “deviant” label. We also explore the strategies that exotic dancers use to maintain the definition of the situation. Our findings indicate that exotic dancers do not define their own identities as predicted. Our data also demonstrate that participants in our study were at least as likely to manage the identities of others as they were their own identities. We conclude our paper by discussing our interpretations of the data and the veracity of ACT.

Unwanted sexual experiences are seldom acknowledged as “rape.” These are identity-threatening events that cause negative affect and cognitive confusion. According to affect control theory, such events produce deflection that is resolved through restorative acts, redefinition of behavior, or modification or redefinition of identities. Since deflection reduction is an underspecified aspect of the theory, we employ theories of power dependence to better understand these processes. Using a mixed method approach, we qualitatively analyze 115 narratives about unwanted sexual experiences, finding respondents framed events in ways that protect the other person or their own self-meanings. We use closed-ended survey data to simulate women’s experiences in Interact, affect control theory’s predictive software, to demonstrate how event reframings reduce deflection. Finally, we estimate regressions to predict how power dependence and other relational contexts influence responses to unwanted sexual experiences.