Affective Meaning
Besides a denotative meaning, every concept has an affective meaning, or connotation, that varies along three dimensions: evaluation – goodness versus badness, potency – powerfulness versus powerlessness, and activity – liveliness versus torpidity. Affective meanings can be measured with semantic differentials yielding a three-number profile indicating how the concept is positioned on evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). Osgood demonstrated that an elementary concept conveyed by a word or idiom has a normative affective meaning within a particular culture.
A stable affective meaning derived either from personal experience or from cultural inculcation is called a sentiment, or fundamental affective meaning, in affect control theory. Affect control theory has inspired assembly of dictionaries of EPA sentiments for thousands of concepts involved in social life – identities, behaviors, settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have been constructed with ratings of respondents from the U.S.A., Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, and China (both the People’s Republic and Taiwan).
Read more about this topic: Affect Control Theory
Famous quotes containing the words affective and/or meaning:
“A concern with parenting...must direct attention beyond behavior. This is because parenting is not simply a set of behaviors, but participation in an interpersonal, diffuse, affective relationship. Parenting is an eminently psychological role in a way that many other roles and activities are not.”
—Nancy Chodorow (20th century)
“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)