|
|
Glossary of Terms Used in Affect Control Theory.From: D. Heise, forthcoming. "Understanding Social
Interaction With Affect Control Theory."
|
| Activity | A dimension of affect relating to arousal versus languor, initiative versus passivity, commotion versus quiescence. |
| affect | Human processes that are mindful but not primarily cognitive and that have a somatic component but are not primarily behavioral. Examples are emotions, sentiments, impressions, motivations. |
| affective meaning | Assessment of an object in terms of how good or bad the object is, how powerful or powerless, how active or inactive, along with the substantial social knowledge that can be generated from these judgments.. |
| amalgamation | Production of a new meaning by pairing a modifier with a noun, as in "rich professor" or "angry admiral." |
| attribution | The process of accounting for an individual's involvements in events by means of a descriptive modifier. Personality traits, moods, status characteristics, or moral dispositions may be attributed. |
| behavior | A process focused by an actor on an object, thereby creating an event and generating transient affective meanings, among other products. |
| cognitive constraints | Categorizations and logical entailments of categories that underlie understanding of events. For example, "son" and "daughter" are linked to gender and to other family identities. |
| inconsistency | A case of colliding meanings. In ACT inconsistencies arise when an event makes an entity seem both good and bad, or powerful and powerless, or active and inactive. |
| control | In general systems theory, any process in which an agent acts to resist changes from the environment or in order to attain a particular goal state. In ACT, the focus is on control processes in which an individual resists changes in affective meanings or attempts to actualize affective meanings. |
| copular | An assertion linking an object to a state, either with a state-of-being verb like "seems" or by grammatical positioning, as in "happy camper." |
| culture | Shared meanings regarding people, processes, and non-human objects. ACT focuses on the part of culture involving affective meanings regarding different kinds of people, interpersonal actions, and social settings. |
| deflection | Deviation of an emergent affective meaning from a fundamental affective meaning. ACT proposes that individuals try to confirm fundamental affective meanings with emergent affective meanings, or, in other words, individuals seek experiences that minimize deflections. |
| denotative meaning | The classification rules for applying a concept to some entity. These rules may include logical linkages that define relationships with other entities. |
| dictionary | A database of words and their meanings. ACT dictionaries consist of words for identities, behaviors, modifiers, or settings. Each word is defined by average EPA profiles from males and females and by classification in social institutions (e.g., religion, academia). |
| distance | The difference between two EPA profiles, measured quantitatively. |
| emergent meaning | Synonymous with transient affective meaning in ACT. |
| emotion | A transient affective state involving a particular physical countenance and a transient affective meaning for the self. |
| EPA dimensions | Evaluation measured on a scale from infinitely good to infinitely bad; Potency measured on a scale from infinitely powerful to infinitely powerless; and Activity measured on a scale from infinitely active to infinitely passive. These are the three universal aspects of affective meaning. |
| EPA profile | A set of three numbers quantitatively defining an entity's affective meaning. The first number is an Evaluation measurement, the second is Potency, the third Activity. |
| Evaluation | A dimension of affect indexing acceptance or rejection with regard to morality, beauty, usefulness, pleasure, etc. |
| event | The combination of an actor, a behavior, an object of action, and possibly a setting. Events influence the affective meanings of their components, and according to ACT, individuals create events so as to produce transient affective meanings that will confirm fundamental affective meanings. |
| feeling | Synonymous with transient affective meaning in ACT. |
| fundamental affective meaning | The persistent, culturally-grounded affective meaning of an entity that serves as a reference for individual experience. |
| identity | A culturally-defined category of person. An individual takes on an identity in each situation, actualizing the identity's fundamental affective meaning and thereby defining the individual's appropriate levels of status, power, and agency in the situation. |
| impression formation | The process by which an event combines affective meanings of actor, behavior, object, and setting and forms new emergent meanings for each element. |
| impression | Synonymous with transient affective meaning in ACT. |
| institution | Associated social settings, identities, and behaviors. These associations set cognitive constraints in ACT analyses of social interaction . |
| Interact | A computer program for analyzing sequences of social interaction, starting with interactants' definitions of the situation in verbal terms. The program incorporates dictionaries to represent cultures, impression-formation equations to describe emergence of new meanings, and mathematically-derived equations to identify events that optimally confirm sentiments. |
| label | An identity that accounts for an individual's involvement in an event. ACT specifies labels in terms of affective meaning, and this criterion has to be combined with cognitive constraints in order to get labels that are both affectively and logically appropriate. |
| likelihood | A subjective assessment of frequency in the circumstances. ACT research finds that high deflection events that disconfirm sentiments seem unlikely, whereas low-deflection events seem likely unless they violate cognitive constraints. |
| logical meaning | Knowledge of Y obtained from X on the premise that Ys invariably are Xs, or require an X. The supposition in ACT is that interpersonal behavior arises largely by maintaining both affective and logical meanings. |
| mood | A non-permanent fundamental affective meaning of the self obtained by amalgamating an emotion with one's situational identity. |
| optimal solution | Completion of a partially-specified event with the behavior or identity that will generate impressions of event elements as close as possible to the elements' fundamental affective meanings. |
| Potency | A dimension of affect registering an entity's impact in terms of being big versus little, powerful versus powerless, consequential versus immaterial. |
| reidentification | Changing an individual's fundamental affective meaning to better fit the individual's manner of participating in a situation. Reidentifications can be accomplished through labeling or attribution. |
| role | A complex of behaviors expected of an individual with a particular identity in a particular institutional setting. ACT predicts role as the behaviors optimally maintaining the identity's fundamental affective meaning. |
| self-directed action | A behavior focused on the self rather than on an external object. |
| sentiment | Synonymous with fundamental affective meaning in ACT. |
| setting | A culturally-defined category of place or time in which certain kinds of interpersonal encounters occur. Events have to be constructed so as to confirm the fundamental affective meaning of the setting if the setting is salient in a situation. |
| simulations | Analyses of social interaction obtained with Interact. |
| situation | The web of meanings, especially about interactants' identities, that controls interactants' behaviors in a social encounter and that allows the interactants to understand what is going on. Defining the situation is a prerequisite for meaningful social interaction. |
| sub-culture | Distinctive meanings maintained by a subgroup of a population for a realm of people, processes, and non-human objects that are of special significance within the subgroup. For example, drug users maintain a sub-culture in which drug users, drug experiences, and drug paraphernalia are more positively evaluated than in the general culture. |
| trait | A culturally-defined personality type that may be attributed to an individual and thereafter is available for adjusting the fundamental affective meaning of the individual in any situation. |
| transient affective meaning | An entity's momentary affective meaning resulting from events. Transient affective meanings change to new transient affective meanings after the next event, as predicted by impression-formation equations. |
|
|