Abstract

Affect control theory is a sociological theory developed for modeling and predicting emotions and social behaviors in social interaction. In this commentary, I identify a few potential problems in the theory, as presented in the target article and elsewhere, and in its suggested compatibility with other major emotion theories. The first problem concerns ACT’s capacity to model emotion generation insofar as emotions have nonconceptual content. The second problem focuses on the limits of modeling interaction on the basis of fixed affective meanings of identities. Finally, ACT has problems with explaining the dynamic change of affective meanings, given its tenets that people seek to maintain the established affective meanings of social roles and situations and deflections are not expressed in behavior but compensated by identity-confirming behavior.