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Comparing Groups' Affective Sentiments To Group Perceptions, Daniel Burton Shank, Alexander Burns

Psychological Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Affect control theory focuses on interaction among individuals, not groups. Groups, like individual identities, vary in affective sentiments across the dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity, but a separate literature shows the importance of the group perceptions of entitativity, homogeneity, essentialism, and agency. Therefore, to consider affect control theory's applicability to groups, we compare these principal group perceptions to affective sentiments for 64 group concepts. The results reveal that affective sentiments correlate with all four group perceptions in meaningful ways.