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We test the proposition that criminal sentiments, which we define as a negative and potent view of a juvenile delinquent (JD), moderate the effect of a delinquency adjudication on self-sentiments. We expect criminal sentiments to reduce self-evaluation and increase self-potency among juvenile delinquents but have no effect on self-sentiments among non-delinquents. We also examine the construct validity of our measure of criminal sentiments by assessing its relationship to beliefs that most people devalue, discriminate against, and fear JDs.

We test these hypotheses with self-administered survey data from two samples of college students and one sample of youths in an aftercare program for delinquent youths. We use endogenous treatment-regression models to identify and reduce the effects of endogeneity between delinquency status and self-sentiments.

Our construct validity assessment shows, as expected, that criminal sentiments are positively related to beliefs that most people devalue, discriminate against, and fear JDs. Our focal analyses support our self-evaluation predictions but not our self-potency predictions.

Our findings suggest that the negative effect of a delinquency label on JDs’ self-esteem depends on the youths’ view of the delinquency label.

This study is the first to test a modified labeling theory proposition on juvenile delinquents.

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 – This paper proposes a new procedure for measuring affective responses during social interaction using facial thermographic imaging.

Methodology – We first describe the results of several small pilot experiments designed to develop and refine this new measure that reveal some of the methodological advantages and challenges offered by this measurement approach. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this measure using data from a laboratory experiment (N=114) in which we used performance feedback to manipulate identity deflection and measured several types of affective responses – including self-impressions and emotions.

Findings – We find warming of the brow (near the corrugator muscle) and cheek (near the zygomatic major muscle) related most strongly to emotion valence and self-potency, with those whose brows and cheeks warmed the most feeling less positive emotion and less potent self-impressions. Warming in the eye area (near the orbicularis oculi) related most closely to undirected identity deflection and to positive self-sentiments. Positive self-views and strong identity disruptions both contributed to warming of the eyes.

Implications – The rigor of contemporary sociological theories of emotion exceeds our current ability to empirically test these theories. Facial thermographic imaging may offer sociologists new assessments of affect and emotion that are ecologically valid, socially unreactive, temporally sensitive, and accurate. This could dramatically improve our ability to test and develop affect based theories of social interaction.

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.

This chapter contributes to drawing Melanesian ethnography out of the exoticizing interest for gift exchange and demand-sharing. Furthermore, it provides an analytical perspective from which it is possible to conceptualize the manipulation of gift and commodity logics as mutually compatible frameworks. Rather than seeing them as contradictory, this perspective enables the theorization of shared calculative agencies that are becoming increasingly common in contemporary Melanesia.

The chapter draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Gilbert Camp, a peri-urban settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, Solomon Islands with a focus on the domestic moral economy of its inhabitants.

The people of Gilbert Camp are confronting a difficult economic and moral dilemma. On the one hand, they are at constant risk of financial failure because of their general conditions of scarcity. On the other, they face the prospect of disrupting some of their much-valued social relationships because such scarcity prevents them from fulfilling their cultural obligations. In order to avoid both risks, they make use of their financial competence and cultural creativity to set up strategies that save them money and preserve these relationships. Situated at the interface between kinship and market values, these strategies contribute to achieving the kind of ‘good’ life that they see as the correct balance between financial prosperity and morality.

Current negotiations over the meaning of buying, selling and taking are changing the values of contemporary sociality in Honiara, Port Vila, and other Melanesian cities. Tradestores simultaneously supply households with food and money, create a sense of sharing, and limit the demand-sharing and the taking of wantoks. Hence they create the conditions for the resolution of tensions over the incompatibility of values of kinship and market that confront the inhabitants of Melanesian cities. Household tradestores thus constitute a major site of these negotiations, and they provide a unique vantage point from which to look at the moral and economic processes that are leading to the future identity of urban Melanesia.

Of contemporary interest in the sociology of emotions and social psychology of self is the question of the reciprocal relation of affect or emotion and self. This question is pursued by asking how affect or emotion impacts the identity theory variables of commitment, identity salience, and role performance as well as by asking how these identity theory variables impact persons’ affective responses. Brief reviews of the general literatures on emotion, the symbolic interactionist literature (from which theoretical frame identity theory derives) on emotion, identity theory itself, and characteristics of social sentiments and emotional outbursts allows the development of expectations about the interrelation of sentiments and emotional outbursts and identity theoretic variables.

We examine the effect of an offender’s occupational status on criminal sentencing recommendations using a vignette experiment that crosses the offender’s occupational status (white-collar vs blue- or pink-collar) and the crime label, with one label (overcharging) associated with white-collar offenders and the other (robbery) associated with lower-status offenders. We expect negative and potent post-crime impressions of the offender and the crime to increase perceptions of criminality and, in turn, the recommended sentence. We term these negative and potent impressions “criminality scores.” Drawing on affect control theory (ACT) impression formation equations, we generate criminality scores for the offenders and the crimes in each condition and, using those scores as a guide, predict that white-collar offenders and offenders described as “robbing” will receive a higher recommended sentence. We also expect eight perceptual factors central to theories of judicial sentencing mediate these relationships.

We test these hypotheses with a vignette experiment, administered to female university students, that varies a male offender’s occupation and the word used to describe his crime.

Consistent with our ACT-derived predictions, white-collar offenders and offenders described as robbing received a higher recommended sentence. But, contrary to predictions, only one perceptual factor, crime seriousness, mediated these effects, and the mediation was partial.

Our findings suggest the perpetrator’s post-crime appearance of negativity and power offer a valuable supplement to theories of judicial sentencing.

This study is the first to test the hypothesis that sentencing disparities may be due to the way the perpetrators’ sociodemographic attributes shape their post-crime appearance of negativity and power.