What is Affect Control Theory?

What is Affect Control Theory?
A very significant part of Sociology’s chapter on control theories is the Affect Control Theory. This theory says that every individual conduct themselves in such a way that they can generate feelings suitable to their interpretation of any situation or event. This behavior is known as the affective meaning that the individuals maintain through their actions which seems relevant to their understanding of any context. This affective meaning is the base of all social institutions because until and unless and individual can act according to the required feelings of a particular situation, there occurs no social relationship. It is also true that the people who are unable to generate feelings through actions cannot identify the real perception of the situation. The situation is therefore viewed by them as something else rather than the real feelings associated with it. With the affective meaning generated with the actions, the individuals can establish a relationship between their experiences and the conventional definition of the context.
Affective meaning
Every concept has an affective meaning that can be measured on a graph of three dimensions. These three dimensions are evaluation, potency and activity. To elaborate on these, each dimension has to be understood individually.
Evaluation-This is a cognitive comparison between goodness and badness of the concept or situation under consideration. The individual develops a perception about the situation which lies at a particular position between extreme goodness and extreme badness.
Potency- This is yet another comparison between how powerful or powerless the situation is. The individual psychologically evaluates the situation in terms of its power and comes out with a result that graphically lies between powerfulness and powerlessness.
Activity- The individual evaluates the situation in terms of its activeness that is how lively or how torpid the situation is. The result of this