Bereavement Adaptation as Deflection Reduction: Bereaved Caregivers Define the Event of Dying

Affect control theory (ACT) has the potential to extend dominant understandings of adaptation to bereavement. Using narratives from bereaved caregivers, we assessed attributions they made about the death of a loved one from cancer. We transformed these attributions into actor-behavior-object events along the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions of ACT. After creating hypothetical baseline deflections for events, we simulated the attributions as events in INTERACT. We found eight emergent categories of resolutions that caregivers used to make sense of the death: caregivers redefined the event to align with their sentiments about the deceased or the death. We also found racial differences in the attributions. White caregivers were more likely to blame themselves or others for the death of their loved one, while black caregivers were more willing to admit their deceased loved one’s faults. These findings demonstrate how caregivers make sense of their grief in a framework of cultural sentiments and underscore the utility of affect control theory in qualitative and theory-generating research.

Affect Control Theories: A Double Special Issue in Honor of David R. Heise

We introduce this two-part special issue that celebrates David Heise and his pathbreaking theories: affect control theory (ACT), affect control theory of the self (ACTS), and affect control theory of institutions (ACTI). These interlocking, multi-level, mathematically based theories explain a range of social processes, including impression formation, social interaction, trait and mood attributions, emotional experiences, emotion management, and identity adoption, and they do so in multiple languages and cultures. The 15 articles in this two-part issue test, apply, and develop the theories in new and innovative ways. After briefly summarizing each theory and Bayesian affect control theory (BayesACT), we highlight the key findings from each of the articles that follow.

So What if They’re Lying to Us? Comparing Rhetorical Strategies for Discrediting Sources of Disinformation and Misinformation Using an Affect-Based Credibility Rating

Despite growing research on false information, a theoretical framework to organize findings is lacking. We use affect control theory to fill this need and introduce the affect-based credibility rating for interpreting the effectiveness of rhetorical strategies in discrediting the source of falsehoods. The rating quantifies the difference in connotations between the labels used to characterize the source and an ideal, credible source. Successful discrediting amplifies the difference. We use the rating to compare rhetorical strategies for discrediting opponents as sources during rival information campaigns about the Equal Rights Amendment. We show claiming the opponent is spreading disinformation rather than misinformation (stating the opponent is spreading falsehoods deliberately, rather than unwittingly) appears more effective at discrediting, particularly when disinformation claims allege more sinister motives for lying. The new rating helps organize findings by enabling direct comparisons between strategies, thereby contributing toward efforts to detect and discredit falsehoods in media.

Theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Identity and Sentiments in Collaborative Groups

Theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Identity and Sentiments in Collaborative Groups (THEMIS.COG) was an interdisciplinary research collaboration of computer scientists and social scientists from the University of Waterloo (Canada), Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (Germany), and Dartmouth College (USA). This white paper summarizes the results of our research at the end of the grant term. Funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform’s Digging Into Data initiative, the project aimed at theoretical and empirical modeling of identity and sentiments in collaborative groups. Understanding the social forces behind self-organized collaboration is important because technological and social innovations are increasingly generated through informal, distributed processes of collaboration, rather than in formal organizational hierarchies or through market forces. Our work used a data-driven approach to explore the social psychological mechanisms that motivate such collaborations and determine their success or failure. We focused on the example of GitHub, the world’s current largest digital platform for open, collaborative software development. In contrast to most, purely inductive contemporary approaches leveraging computational techniques for social science, THEMIS.COG followed a deductive, theory-driven approach. We capitalized on affect control theory, a mathematically formalized theory of symbolic interaction originated by sociologist David R. Heise and further advanced in previous work by some of the THEMIS.COG collaborators, among others. Affect control theory states that people control their social behaviours by intuitively attempting to verify culturally shared feelings about identities, social roles, and behaviour settings. From this principle, implemented in computational simulation models, precise predictions about group dynamics can be derived. It was the goal of THEMIS.COG to adapt and apply this approach to study the GitHub collaboration ecosystem through a symbolic interactionist lens. The project contributed substantially to the novel endeavor of theory development in social science based on large amounts of naturally occurring digital data.

Critiquing Child characters as Heroes, Villains, and Victims in Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane

Social behaviour and filial background define the formation and development of a character that is bound by cultural influence in South Asian fiction. Ru Freeman weaves numerous characters and their stories in a single lane as a synecdoche of Sri Lankan history. On Sal Mal Lane (2014) showcases the different social groups defining Sri Lankan conflict in the 1980s with the presence of child characters who are unaware of the extent of the ethnic conflict swirling in the background of the narrative. This paper tries to define the concepts of heroes, villains, and victims through the socio-emotional development of the characters to determine the contradiction between their intentions and subsequent actions. The study uses Character Theory and elements of Affect Control Theory for critical analysis. The paper analyses the change in personality traits of child characters in response to the violence wrought by Sri Lankan ethnic prejudices and the extent of destructive development from the unstable familial and societal environments.

Operationalizing the Relation Between Affect and Cognition With the Somatic Transform

This article introduces the somatic transform that operationalizes the relation between affect and cognition at the psychological level of analysis by capitalizing on the relation between the cognitive-denotative and affective-connotative meaning of concepts as measured with semantic differential rating scales. Following discussion of levels of analysis, the importance of language at the psychological level, and two principles (inextricability and complementarity) summarizing the relation between affect and cognition that are rendered explicit by the somatic transform, we present affect control theory (ACT) and its Bayesian extension (BayesACT) containing the somatic transform. We conclude by identifying examples of inextricability and complementarity in the social science and neuroscience literatures and discussing how our psychological model might be implemented in a realistic neural model.

Event Likelihood Judgments Revisited

Affect control theory shows how cultural meanings for identities and behaviors are used to form impressions of events and guide social action. The theory’s impression formation equations are the engine of its predictions about events and the deflection they generate (i.e., how much they violate, versus conform to, cultural prescriptions). In this research, I examine the relationship between affective (deflection) and cognitive responses to events, with a focus on judgments of event likelihood. I present a series of analyses that show that event likelihood judgments are impacted by events’ perceived normativity, commonality in social life, and our personal experience with events like them and by the appearance likelihood of the actors, combinations of actors, and behaviors they involve and that likelihood ratings and deflection most often diverge for institutionally vague events. I additionally show that deflection computed using Heise’s 2014 impression-change equations strongly predicts event likelihood.

The Social Psychology of Occupational Status Groups: Relationality in the Structure of Deference

Affect Control Theory (ACT) can predict the average deference that occupational identities receive from others. These “deference scores” can capture occupational status better than previous operationalizations of prestige. Combining this new measurement of occupational status with social network methods, this article explores the underlying relational patterns hidden within Freeland and Hoey’s (2018) scores of average deference. I construct a complete network of deference relations across 303 occupational identities using Bayesian ACT simulations. A blockmodel analysis of this network resulted in four positions within the occupational deference structure: everyday specialists, service-to-society occupations, the disagreeably powerful, and the actively revered. These are occupational classes that defer to the same occupational identities and receive deference from the same occupations. Exploring the reduced blockmodel provides a more complete depiction of the occupational status structure as measured by ACT.

The Affective Self: Perseverance of Self-Sentiments in Late-Life Dementia

The self has long been construed as a rational, cognitive construct; the cognitive decline of dementia has therefore been largely viewed as the loss of self. Through qualitative interviews, we find that persons with dementia strive to maintain a coherent self despite their increasing disability. Using the theories of affect control theory (ACT) and ACT-Self, we illustrate their shift from using denotative (cognitive) meanings to reliance on connotative (affective) meanings in defining the situation and choosing identities to enact. As persons with dementia lose the cognitive ability to access shared definitions and reflected appraisals, their connection to the social world narrows to affective meanings of established sentiments and emotional reactions from others. Our findings underscore the creative agency of self and the limitations of the rationalistic bias of sociology by recognizing an affective self that stands in complement to the generally acknowledged cognitive self.