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The present research builds on three complementary theories to explore how social influence processes in interaction bring about opinion and sentiment change: expectation states theory, affect control theory, and social influence network theory.

An experimental study is used to test intersections between the theories and assess how performance expectations, affective impressions of group members, and emergent perceptions of their influence work together to generate opinion and sentiment change.

Respondent opinions shifted in the direction of group leaders’ opinions, regardless of behavioral interchange patterns. Opinion change was greater when a third group member shared the leader’s opinion. Change in affective impressions was shaped by the group leader’s opinion, the assertiveness of their behavior, and the support of a third group member. The perceived influence composition of the group predicted opinion and sentiment change, above and beyond the effects of conditional manipulations. Features of the group interaction led to inferences about status characteristics that reinforced the influence order of the group.

The chapter tests hypotheses from earlier work and explores status signals not yet tested as predictors of opinion change – behavioral interchange patterns and the degree of support for one’s ideas. In addition, it examines inferences about status characteristics following the group discussion, and influence effects on the prevailing definition of the situation.

This chapter contributes to recent integrative work that explores the relationship between performance expectations, affective impressions, and social influence. Synergistic processes forwarded by earlier research are tested, along with several newly proposed linkages.

Various mass shooters have explained their violent actions as a response to failing at dominant forms of masculinity, including rejection from women and negative social comparisons to other men. The affect control theory of self (ACT-Self) posits that interactions that violate one's sense of self cause inauthenticity. This disequilibrium motivates behaviors that restore self-meanings, which may partially explain the link between challenges to the self and compensatory violence.

In Study 1, we use ACT-Self to examine the relationship between inauthenticity, violent fantasies, and physical aggression in the autobiography of one mass shooter. We quantify self-sentiments and inauthenticity using ACT-Self measures and methods, and perform a thematic analysis of the shooter's interpretations of and responses to disconfirming events. In Study 2, we examine the relationship between these same concepts in a survey of 18-to-32-year-old men (N = 847).

Study 1 shows that the shooter's inability to achieve popularity, wealth, sex, and relationships with beautiful women (compared to other men) produced inauthenticity that he resolved through violent fantasies, increasingly aggressive behavior, and ultimately, mass violence. Study 2 finds that inauthenticity arising from reflected appraisals from women predicts self-reported violent fantasies and physical aggression in a convenience sample of men in emerging adulthood.

This work leverages a formal social psychological theory to examine the link between self-processes and violence. Our findings suggest that men's inauthenticity, particularly produced by reflected appraisals from women, is positively associated with violent fantasies and acts. Further work is needed to assess whether this relationship is causal and for whom.

To provide a comprehensive review of theoretical and research advances in affect control theory from 1988 to 2013 for academic and student researchers in social psychology.

Against the background of a concise history of affect control theory from its beginnings in the 1960s to its maturation in the late 1980s, a comprehensive review of research and publications in the last 25 years is reported in five sections: Theoretical Advances (e.g., self and institutions, nonverbal behavior, neuroscience, artificial intelligence); Technological Advances (e.g., electronic data collection, computer simulations, cultural surveys, equation refinement, small groups analysis); Cross-Cultural Research (archived data and published analyses); Empirical Tests of the Theory; and Substantive Applications (e.g., emotions, social and cultural change, occupations/work, politics, gender/ideology/subcultures, deviance, criminology, stereotyping, physiological behavior).

Reveals an impressive number of publications in this area, including over 120 articles and chapters and four major books, and a great deal of cross-cultural research, including European, Asian, and Middle-Asian cultures.

Because of limitations of space, the review does not cover the large number of theses, dissertations, and research reports.

No other review of affect control theory with this scope and detail exists.

This paper works at the intersections of affect control theory, expectation states theory, and social influence network theory. First, we introduce social influence network theory into affect control theory. We show how an influence network may emerge from the pattern of interpersonal sentiments in a group and how the fundamental sentiments that are at the core of affect control theory (dealing with the evaluation, potency, and activity of self and others) may be modified by interpersonal influences. Second, we bring affect control theory and social influence network theory to bear on expectation states theory. In a task-oriented group, where persons’ performance expectations may be a major basis of their interpersonal influence, we argue that persons’ fundamental sentiments may mediate effects of status characteristics on group members’ performance expectations. Based on the linkage of fundamental sentiments and interpersonal influence, we develop an account of the formation of influence networks in groups that is applicable to both status homogeneous and status heterogeneous groups of any size, whether or not they are completely connected, and that is not restricted in scope to task-oriented groups.

Purpose: Prior work has convincingly argued that social inequalities arise from the basic human tendency to place others into social categories with different cultural meanings and to allocate resources unequally across those categories. However, few studies have sought to identify the micro-level mechanisms that sustain and justify this categorical inequality. In this research, I show how affect control theory (ACT) can be used to generate novel predictions about the interaction processes that perpetuate stratification.

Methodology/Approach: I present a series of analyses based in ACT that examine (1) whether categorical inequality is reflected in cultural sentiments for social groups, (2) whether patterns of normative behavior and social treatment vary based on category membership, and (3) whether interactions produce different emotions based on category membership.

Findings: Analysis 1 identifies four distinct patterns of cultural meanings that differentiate the groups studied. Analyses 2 and 3 show how these differences in cultural meanings produce categorical inequality through interpersonal behavior and emotional experiences in normative social encounters. Unequal cultural meanings for social groups correspond with their positionality in the social order and support patterns of situated behavior and emotions that keep groups with different levels of status and power separate and unequal.

Originality/Value: This research shows how social norms constrain and enable actions and emotions by members of different social categories, how they depend on the combinations of actors who appear together in a given social encounter, and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in ways not well accounted for by earlier work.

We examine whether self-stigmatization may affect the everyday social interactions of individuals with a diagnosed, affective mental health disorder. Past research demonstrates self-stigmatization lowers self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency, leading to the likely adoption of role-identities that are at the periphery of major social institutions. We advance research on self-stigma by examining the likely interactional and emotional consequences of enacting either a highly stigmatized self-identity or a weakly stigmatized self-identity.

Using affect control theory (ACT), we form predictions related to the interactional and emotional consequences of self-stigmatization. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized instantiation of ACT, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder), comparing simulations where the focal actor is a person with a mental illness who exhibits either high or low levels of self-stigma.

Self-stigma is predicted to negatively influence patients’ behavioral expression, leading the highly self-stigmatized to enact behaviors that are lower in goodness, power, and liveliness than the weakly self-stigmatized. Their corresponding emotional expressions during these types of interactions are similarly negatively impacted. Even though these likely interactions are the most confirmatory for people with high levels of self-stigma, they lead to interactions that are behaviorally and emotionally more negative than those who have been better able to resist internalizing stigmatizing beliefs.

This piece has implications for the literature on the interactional and life course challenges faced by psychiatric patients and contributes to the self-stigma literature more broadly. This work will hopefully inform future research involving the collection of non-simulation-based data on the everyday interactional experiences of people with mental health problems.

Affect control theory describes a process in which individuals work to maintain existing situated identities. In this paper, we extend affect control theory to explain selective identity preferences in occupational settings. We argue that individuals form preferences about potential future identities with an eye to maintaining consistency between their potential experiences and their existing biographical identities. In particular, we suggest that occupational identity preferences reflect work-specific biographical identities called worker identities. We then predict that individuals who are seeking alternative or additional occupational identities will prefer those that evoke sentiments that are similar to those evoked by their worker identities. We find that current worker sentiments predict reports of desired and undesired future occupational identities, to include generalized military identities, to a remarkable degree. We discuss the implications for research on occupational mobility, work, and life course, as well as for existing identity theories.

We argue that self-stigma places patients on a path of marginalization throughout their life course leading to a negative cycle of opportunity and advancement. Mental health patients with higher levels of self-stigma tend to have much lower self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency; therefore, they will be more inclined to adopt role-identities at the periphery of major social institutions, like those of work, family, and academia. Similarly, the emotions felt when enacting such roles may be similarly dampened.

Utilizing principles from affect control theory (ACT) and the affect control theory of selves (ACTS), we generate predictions related to self-stigmatized patients’ role-identity adoption and emotions. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized version of ACT and ACTS, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder) with comparably high or low levels of self-stigmatization.

Self-stigma among affective patients reduces the tendency to adopt major life course identities. Self-stigma also affects patients’ emotional expression by compelling patients to seek out interactions that make them feel anxious or affectively neutral.

This piece has implications for the self-stigma and stigma literatures. It is also one of the first pieces to utilize ACTS, thereby offering a new framework for understanding the self-stigma process. We offer new hypotheses for future research to test with non-simulation-based data and suggest some policy implications.

Purpose: We examine how one's occupational class affects emotional experience. To do this, we look at both general affective outcomes (job satisfaction, respect at work, and life happiness) and the experience of specific positive emotions (overjoyed, proud, and excited) during the week.

Methodology/Approach: Using affect control theory simulations, we find the characteristic emotions of four occupational classes, derived from Maloney's (2020) block model analysis: everyday specialists, service-to-society occupations, the disagreeably powerful, and the actively revered. Using these characteristic emotions, we make predictions about how likely it is that individuals in these occupational classes will report workplace affective experiences: job satisfaction and respect at work, and broader affective experience: general happiness in the prior year. Lastly, we generate and test predictions about everyday emotional experience of positive emotions.

Findings: We find mixed results for our hypotheses. In general, our predictions regarding the actively revered as the highest status block in Maloney (2020) are supported for general happiness, job satisfaction, and daily emotional experience. However, we find higher probabilities of happiness and job satisfaction for the disagreeably powerful, a lower evaluation but higher power block, than were expected.

Research Limitations: The current analysis uses only 268 occupations out of the 650 occupational titles in the US Census three-digit occupational codes. An analysis that includes the entire occupational structure would be more definitive. Additionally, it would be preferable to have emotion-dependent variables that were specifically tied to work, rather than broader emotional experience, to have a cleaner test of our hypotheses about occupational identities.

Practical and Social Implications: Prior research has shown how the emotional experiences associated with different identity labels can explain mental health outcomes, workplace anger, and broader patterns of inequality (Foy, Freeland, Miles, Rogers, & Smith-Lovin, 2014; Kroska & Harkness, 2008, 2016; Lively & Powell, 2016). Understanding how occupational class elicits certain types of emotions in everyday interactions may help scholars explain differences in health and overall life satisfaction across occupations that are not explained by material resource differentiation.

The present chapter expands on recent research demonstrating an empirical link between theoretical constructs within affect control theory (ACT) and expectation states theory. I explore the utility of a joint application of the two theories, employing simulated interactions to examine status organizing processes.

Although simulation results do not constitute data by which theoretical claims can be tested, they are useful for developing new research questions. I report results from a series of simulated dyadic interactions using ACT’s Interact program to investigate potential emotional and identity processes that underlie the enactment of status differences, and to explore affective responses to the legitimation and delegitimation of status orders.

Simulation results call attention to a dynamic interplay between structural elements of the situation and the agentic behavior of interactants, suggesting that behavioral attempts to reduce deflections may lead to shifts in expectations over the course of interaction. Results raise the possibility that differences in affective impressions may produce expectations that are initially asymmetrical between interaction partners. Further, results suggest that the standardized tasks commonly employed in expectation states research may unintentionally generate affective responses that encourage status convergence.

Drawing on insights and methods from ACT, expectation states researchers can improve the scientific understanding of small group interaction. Employing simulated interactions, researchers can promote theoretical advancement by uncovering new lines of inquiry at the intersection of two prominent social psychological traditions. Simulations also provide a further tool for methodological refinement within the standardized experimental setting.