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.
Affective meaning
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, behaviours, settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have been constructed with ratings of respondents from the US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, China and Taiwan.
Impression formation
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. An actor who behaves disagreeably seems less good, especially if the object of the behavior is innocent and powerless, like a child. A powerful person seems desperate when performing extremely forceful acts on another, and the object person may seem invincible.
A social action creates impressions of the actor, the object person, the behavior, and the setting.
Deflections
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.
The basic cybernetic idea of affect control theory can be stated in terms of deflections. An individual selects a behavior that produces the minimum deflections for concepts involved in the action. Minimization of deflections is described by equations derived with calculus from empirical impression-formation equations.
Action
On entering a scene an individual defines the situation by assigning identities to each participant, frequently in accord with an encompassing social institution. While defining the situation, the individual tries to maintain the affective meaning of self through adoption of an identity whose sentiment serves as a surrogate for the individual's self-sentiment. The identities assembled in the definition of the situation determine the sentiments that the individual tries to maintain behaviorally.
Confirming sentiments associated with institutional identities – like doctor–patient, lawyer–client, or professor–student – creates institutionally relevant role behavior.
Confirming sentiments associated with negatively evaluated identities – like bully, glutton, loafer, or scatterbrain – generates deviant behavior. Affect control theory's sentiment databases and mathematical model are combined in a computer simulation program for analyzing social interaction in various cultures.