AFFECT CONTROL THEORY AND IMPRESSION FORMATIONidentity with personal traits. Thus, an authoritari-
an professor evokes an impression roughly similar
to a rich professor since the affective association
for authoritarian is similar to that for rich.
Another example involving emotion illustrates
additional processes involved in combining per-
sonal characteristics with social identities (Heise
and Thomas 1989). Being outraged implies that
one is feeling quite bad, somewhat potent, and
somewhat lively. A child is felt to be quite good,
quite impotent, and very active. The combination
‘‘outraged child,’’ seems fairly bad, partly because
the child is flaunting personalized power deriving
from an emotion and partly because the mind
discounts customary esteem for a person if there is
a personal basis for evaluating the person nega-
tively: The child’s negative emotion undercuts the
regard one usually has for a child. The child’s
impotency is reduced because of a bad and potent
emotional state. And the child’s activity is greater
than usual because the activity of the emotion and
the activity of the identity combine additively.
The combining of attributions and identities
involves somewhat different processes in different
domains. For example, North American males and
females process attributions in the same way,
though both make attributions about females that
are more governed by morality considerations
than attributions about males (Heise 1999). Mean-
while, Japanese males are socialized to be more
concerned than Japanese females with evaluative
consistency in attributions and with matching good-
ness and weakness, so Japanese males process
attributions about everything with more concern
for morality than do Japanese females (Smith,
Matsuno, and Ike 1999).
Events are another basis for impression for-
mation. A social event—an actor behaving on an
object or person within some setting—amalgamates
EPA impressions of the elements comprising the
event and generates a new impression of each
element. For example, when an athlete strangles a
coach, the athlete seems bad, and the coach seems
cowardly because the coach loses both goodness
and potency as a result of the event. The complex
equations for predicting outcome impressions from
input impressions have been found to be similar
in different cultures (Heise 1979; Smith-Lovin
1987a; Smith-Lovin 1987b; Smith, Matsuno, and
Umino 1994).
To a degree, the character of a behavior dif-
fuses to the actor who performs the behavior. For
example, an admired person who engages in a
violent act seems less good, more potent, and
more active than usual. Impressions of the actor
also are influenced by complex interplays between
the nature of the behavior and the nature of the
object. For example, violence toward an enemy
does not stigmatize an actor nearly so much as
violence toward a child. That is because bad, force-
ful behaviors toward bad, potent objects seem
justified while such behaviors toward good, weak
objects seem ruthless. Moreover, the degree of
justification or of ruthlessness depends on how
good the actor was in the first place; for example, a
person who acts violently toward a child loses
more respect if initially esteemed than if already
stigmatized.Similarly, diffusions of feeling from one event
element to another and complex interplays be-
tween event elements generate impressions of
behaviors, objects, and settings. The general prin-
ciple is that initial affective meanings of event
elements combine and thereby produce new im-
pressions that reflect the meaning of the event.
Those impressions are transient because they, in
turn, are the meanings that are transformed by
later events.IMPRESSION MANAGEMENTNormal events produce transient impressions that
match sentiments, whereas events that generate
impressions deviating widely from sentiments seem
abnormal (Heise and MacKinnon 1987). For ex-
ample, ‘‘a parent assisting a child’’ creates impres-
sions of parent, child, and assisting that are close
to sentiments provided by our culture, and the
event seems normal. On the other hand, ‘‘a parent
harming a child’’ seems abnormal because the
event produces negative impressions of parent
and child that are far different than the culturally-
given notions that parents and children are good.According to affect control theory, people
manage events so as to match transient impres-
sions with sentiments and thereby maintain nor-
mality in their experience. Expressive shaping of
events occurs within orderly rational action, and
ordinarily the expressive and the rational compo-
nents of action complement each other because