AFFECT CONTROL THEORY AND IMPRESSION FORMATIONcultural sentiments incite the very events that are
required by the logic of social institutions like the
family, law, religion, etc.
Having adopted an appropriate identity at a
scene and having cast others in complementary
identities, a person intuits behaviors that will cre-
ate normal impressions. For example, if a person
in the role of judge is to act on someone who is a
proven crook, then she must do something that
confirms a judge’s power and that confirms the
badness of a crook, and behaviors like ‘‘convict’’
and ‘‘sentence’’ produce the right impressions.
Fitting behaviors may change in the wake of prior
events. For example, a father who is fulfilling his
role in a mediocre manner because his child has
disobeyed him strives to regain goodness and
power by controlling the child or by dramatizing
forgiveness. Other people’s identities may serve as
resources for restoring a compromised identity
(Wiggins and Heise 1987); for example, a father
shaken by a child’s disobedience might recover his
poise by supporting and defending mother.
Behaviors that confirm sentiments are the
intrinsically motivated behaviors in a situation.
Actors sometimes comply to the demands of oth-
ers and thereby forego intrinsically motivated be-
haviors. Yet compliance also reflects the basic
principle since compliant behavior is normal in
one relationship even though it may be abnormal
in another relationship. For example, a child acts
normally when calling on a playmate though also
abnormally if his mother has ordered him not to
do so and he disobeys her. The actor maintains the
relationship that is most salient.
Sometimes other people produce events that
do not confirm sentiments evoked by one’s own
definition of a situation. Affect control theory
suggests several routes for restoring consistency
between impressions and sentiments in such cases.
First, people may try to reinterpret other’s actions
so as to optimize expressive coherence. For exam-
ple, an actor’s movement away from another per-
son can be viewed as departing, leaving, escaping,
fleeing, deserting—and one chooses the interpre-
tation that seems most normal, given participants’
identities and prior events (Heise 1979). Of course,
interpretations of a behavior are bound by deter-
minable facts about the behavior and its conse-
quences, so some behaviors cannot be interpreted
in a way that completely normalizes an event.
Another response to disturbing events is con-
struction of new events that transform abnormal
impressions back to normality. Restorative events
with the self as actor might be feasible and enact-
ed, as in the example of a father controlling a
disobedient child. Restorative events that require
others to act might be elicited by suggesting what
the other should do. For example, after a child has
disobeyed his mother, a father might tell the child
to apologize.Intractable disturbances in interaction that
cannot be handled by reinterpreting others’ ac-
tions or by instigating new events lead to changes
in how people are viewed, such as attributing
character traits to people in order to form com-
plex identities that account for participation in
certain kinds of anomalous events. For example, a
father who has ignored his child might be viewed
as an inconsiderate person.Changing base identities also can produce the
kind of person who would participate in certain
events. For example, an employee cheating an
employer would be expressively coherent were the
employee known to be a lawbreaker, and a cheat-
ing incident may instigate legal actions that apply a
lawbreaker label and that withdraw the employee
identity. The criminal justice system changes ac-
tors in deviant events into the kinds of people who
routinely engage in deviant actions, thereby allow-
ing the rest of us to feel that we understand why
bad things happen.
Trait attributions and labels that normalize
particular incidents are added to conceptions of
people, and thereafter the special identities may
be invoked in order to set expectations for a
person’s behavior in other scenes or to under-
stand other incidents. Everyone who interacts with
a person builds up knowledge about the person’s
capacities in this way, and a person builds up
knowledge about the self in this way as well.EMOTIONAffect control theory is a central framework in the
sociology of emotions (Thoits 1989; Smith-Lovin
1994), and its predictions about emotions in vari-
ous situations match well with the predictions of
real people who imagine themselves in those situa-
tions (Heise and Weir 1999). According to affect
control theory, spontaneous emotion reflects the