Acts Emerging From Acts

When you get together with others for social interaction, you invest yourself in an identity that is appropriate for the immediate situation. Additionally you assign identities to others who are present, altercasting them in roles that make sense with your own. Then you create events that confirm the affective meanings of your own and others' identities. Other interactants in the situation operate the same way as you do, choosing actions that validate their sentiments about the identities they discern in the situation. Sequences of social interaction and social emotions emerge as you and other individuals act on each other, in the context of actions by the others, in order to experience your sentiments in reality.

Consider a simple example where interaction is straightforward. You are with your sweetheart - sweetheart is the identity you assign the other - and you take that same identity for yourself. Suppose the other sees the situation the same way - the two of you are sweethearts. Given these identities, you and the other can perform many validating behaviors with each other, such as: court, laugh with, speak to, desire sexually, embrace, compliment, satisfy, kiss, fondle, amuse, welcome, play with, caress, defend, please, sleep with, interest, treat, warn, cheer.

Suppose you compliment your sweetheart. The event makes you feel an emotion like generous, compassionate, affectionate, warm, secure; and it makes your sweetheart feel an emotion like contented, relieved, at ease, appreciative, touched. In response, suppose your sweetheart kisses you; that causes your sweetheart to feel compassionate, generous, warm, appreciative, or affectionate; while you feel something like secure, appreciative, generous, compassionate, or grateful. Exchanging such acts back and forth accurately validates the meaning of sweetheart, in that the impressions created of each person match the sentiment associated with sweetheart. Such acts between sweethearts additionally produce the emotions associated with the sweetheart relationship.

(Behaviors and emotions mentioned in this example and in the examples below come from Interact analyses, using male equations with EPA profiles averaged across females and males.)

Complications

One kind of complication in social interaction arises when an individual's positive self esteem has been challenged in a prior situation, and the individual uses people in the immediate situation as a resource to repair the damaged self. Affect control theory predicts that an individual with a damaged self will act more positively toward valued others in order to rebuild a sense of self worth.

For example, suppose that you are with your sweetheart, but your sweetheart has just come from another situation where he or she was degraded by an insult from a boss. In this case, your sweetheart carries a transient impression that is much more negative than a sweetheart should have. According to ACT predictions, your sweetheart will engage you in an especially positive action - like making love - in an effort to pull the transient impression of self up to a more positive value. An ACT prediction of this kind was confirmed among individuals in an experiment designed to test the prediction.

See this working with the interaction simulator. Set the fundamental evaluations of individuals X and Y at 3 to represent the sweetheart identities, set the transient evaluation of X at 0 (zero) to represent that individual's degradation, and set the transient evaluation of Y at 3 to show that Y has an unsoiled sweetheart identity. Then click the button called Get X's act on Y, and you get a value of 4.25 for the evaluation of X's action toward Y, indicating that X's impulse is to engage in an extremely positive act toward Y, like making love to. Does the repair function of this action degrade the emotions involved in the act of love?

Negative acts within a relationship damage both individuals. Then neither can serve as a resource for the other to regain self esteem. Instead the interactants have to repair their damaged selves through a series of actions that edge them back toward normality.

Suppose your sweetheart meets you for a date wearing a new pair of shoes. The shoes strike you as so outlandishly silly looking that you break out laughing as you stare at them. However, a glance upward reveals that your sweetheart's face has tightened into resentment, and you hear the words, "Done ridiculing me?" Your jaw drops as you realize that is exactly what you just did. Feeling awful, you sheepishly accept your sweetheart's lecture about fashion, or about attending to others' feelings, or the solemn forgiveness your sweetheart offers to you. Still feeling melancholy you offer your heartfelt assurance of love. After some poignant hugging, then some  exultant kisses, the two of you finally get back to your normal sweetheart relationship!

Examine a numerical representation of this process with the interaction simulator. Set the fundamental evaluations of individuals X and Y at 3 to represent the sweetheart identities, and represent the ridiculing by typing -3 in the box representing X's action toward Y. (Be sure to click somewhere outside the box after you enter -3.) Then click the button, Do X's act on Y, to start the sequence, and exchange ideal acts back and forth between Y and X. See how the initial negative act continues to affect impressions, deflections, behaviors, and emotions for several rounds of interaction?

Negative actions within a positive relationship generally occur because different interactants frame an action differently. That is the case above where one sweetheart laughs until the other sweetheart lets it be known that laugh at is what is happening rather than laugh with!

Additional complications in social interaction arise when one individual defines the situation differently than the others do. An example of this kind of predicament is given in the section on Social Roles. A similar kind of complication arises when an individual defines the situation the same way as others do but has unshared sentiments about some of the salient identities - see the section on Sub-Cultures for more on this possibility. Interactions with deviants have distinctive features - see the section on Deviants.

Group interaction

In a group of three or more individuals you can chose your partner for events. ACT predicts that you will chose interaction partners so as to experience events that maximally confirm your sentiments.

One implication of this principle is that individuals with negative self esteem should prefer to interact with others who criticize them, even if the derogations are emotionally painful! That is because being criticized is an experience that confirms a negative self sentiment. This prediction is startling for those of us who have positive self esteem, because we prefer to be with others who appreciate us. That preference also fits the ACT prediction, of course: being appreciated is an experience that confirms a positive self sentiment, and so people with positive self esteem prefer to interact with appreciators. Experiments by several researchers have substantiated these ACT predictions among people with varying self sentiments, who have to decide whether critics or appreciators will be their future interaction partners.

The same basic principle explains how friendship cliques form in groups. Your identity in a group will be confirmed best by affiliating with people having compatible identities, and may be disconfirmed by affiliating with people with incompatible identities.

For example, Interact analyses suggest that in a courthouse, prosecutors and lawyers like each other, judges are neither liked nor disliked though judges do like attorneys, and everyone feels negatively toward defendants and criminals. Thus, we can expect a courthouse clique to form consisting of prosecuting and defending attorneys with judges at the edge, while defendants and criminals being processed by the legal system are social isolates in the courthouse setting.

Personal factors also are involved in clique formation - e.g., some attorneys may be unpopular and not part of a courthouse clique because of their personalities. ACT predictions adapt to the notion of personality if we view personality as a personal identity that an individual tries to maintain.

The emotional tone of interaction within small groups of individuals emerges from the identities that are salient in the interaction. For example, a father interacting with mother might feel friendliness, and he might feel affection while interacting with offspring. A brother initiating actions with his sister might feel at-ease, contented, touched, or moved; or humbled, melancholy, overwhelmed when his sister takes initiative. Further, a boy may have different emotions when interacting with his sister than when interacting with his parents because somewhat different sentiments are associated with the identities of brother and son.

The figure below identifies typical emotions nuclear family members might have while interacting with one another, as each takes appropriate relational identities and as each seeks identity confirmation over the course of several events. (These emotions predicted in Interact analyses are plotted on evaluation and activity, which are the two best dimensions for discriminating emotions). Feeling contented, at-ease, appreciative is a common part of everyone's family experience. Mother-wife stays at least this positive and moves toward amusement, cheerfulness, and warmth on occasions. Father-husband experiences much the same emotions, plus some less intense ones like feeling calm, secure, and relaxed. Daughter-sister's emotions are much like father's except with more opportunities for feeling warmth and compassion. Son-brother's emotions are most distinctive: contentment and amusement are about the most positive emotions the boy attains (the Son polygon ends at the left edge of the Mother polygon); additionally, in many interactions the boy experiences emotional neutrality or drops off to listless melancholy.

Compare the emotional tone of family life with the emotional tone of courtroom interactions, represented in the next figure. In this analysis, each courtroom character is viewed as having three alternate identities (Judge, Authority, Expert; Prosecuting Attorney, District Attorney, Civil Servant; Lawyer, Attorney, Mouthpiece; Defendant, Client, Accused), and the range of emotion for a character is the cumulation of emotions accompanying the theoretically optimal event for each of the character's identities when paired with all of the identities of every other person. You can see that the courtroom situation is largely emotionally neutral for all characters. When moved beyond emotional neutrality, the judge and lawyer may experience low intensity positive emotions like contentment. The prosecutor's contentiousness can generate anxiety for her and sometimes anger. The defendant's passive status makes her likely to have low-activation emotions like gloominess, melancholy, or relaxation.

Generalizing from these two analyses, we might speculate that: