Sociologist Erving Goffman (1969) argued that people conduct themselves so as to generate impressions that maintain the identities, or "faces," that they have in social situations. Human action—aside from accomplishing tasks—functions expressively in reflecting actors' social positions and in preserving social order. Affect control theory (Heise 1979; Smith-Lovin and Heise 1988; MacKinnon 1994) continues Goffman's thesis, providing a mathematized and empirically grounded model for explaining and predicting expressive aspects of action.

Affective Meaning

Cross-cultural research among people speaking diverse languages in more than twenty-five nations around the world (Osgood, May, and Miron 1975) revealed that any person, behavior, object, setting, or property of persons evokes an affective response consisting of three components. One component consists of approval or disapproval of the entity—an evaluation based on morality (good versus bad), aesthetics (beautiful versus ugly), functionality (useful versus useless), hedonism (pleasant versus...