Affect Control Theory

Abstract

When David Heise (1977,1979) published his early statements of affect control theory, contribut-ing to the newly developing sociology of emotion was not his primary goal. The main objective of the theory was to explain behavior in the context of social interactions. Heise hoped to develop a formal framework that could describe both the routine, expected role behaviors that people enact under normal circumstances and the creative responses they generate when encountering noninstitutionalized or counternormative situations. He combined insights from a measurement tradition in psycholinguistics (Osgood 1962, 1966; Osgood et al. 1973, 1975), empirical studies of impression formation (Gollob 1968; Gollob and Rossman 1973; Heise 1969, 1970), and a cybernetic model of perception (Powers 1973) to create his new theory of social action.