About

Lynn Smith-Lovin is the Robert L. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Duke University, where she has held the position since 2004. Her research focuses on emotion, identity, and action, with a particular interest in how identities influence social interaction. She employs a variety of methods including experimental, observational, survey, and simulation techniques to explore the interrelations among identities, actions, and emotions. Her experimental work often involves creating social situations where unusual events occur to observe behavioral and emotional responses, while her observational studies analyze small task group interactions to understand how identities shape conversational behavior. Additionally, her survey research frequently examines gender and other social positions that influence group dynamics and social networks. Her simulation studies involve affect control theory, a mathematical model that explains how identities, actions, and emotions affect one another. Currently, she is integrating affect control theory with McPherson’s ecological theory of affiliation to demonstrate the connections between social systems, identities, and emotional experiences.

Selected publications

• Affect control theory: a formal theory of identity, action and emotion

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-06-03

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Deviations from cultural consensus about occupations: The duality of occupation meanings and Americans’ meaning communities

  Social Networks · 2025-04-17 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  We examine ratings of 642 occupations by a national online sample of U.S respondents in 2019 (Freeland et al., 2020). We analyze the respondents’ ratings of occupations on three dimensions of cultural meaning—evaluation (good versus bad), potency (powerful versus powerless), and activity (lively versus quiet). We take deviations of respondents’ individual ratings from population evaluation, potency and activity estimates, focusing on deviations from consensus rather than consensus itself. Drawing on Breiger's (1974) work on duality, we examine two projections of the initial rectangular matrix of correlated deviations. Our two projections represent (1) the cultural communities that people form when they differ from consensus in similar ways, and (2) the clusters of occupations that move in similar ways across those subcultures. Correlations among the residuals at the person level are indicators of shared subcultural differences from the mainstream—different ways of meaning-making about what is valuable and worthy about occupational work. At the occupation level, the structure represents schemas for which occupations share common elements and move together when those elements are evaluated differently. We use dyad models to investigate what metrics of occupation similarity predict similarity in deviations from consensus. We find that similarity in affective meaning (evaluation, potency and activity), material requirements, rewards, and work characteristics all predict clustering at the occupation level. Demographic composition of occupations is less important. We find that older respondents, White respondents, and higher income respondents tend to discriminate more between occupations on evaluation and potency. Respondents who are more similar in age have more similar patterns of deviations. However, occupation-level variables are in general much stronger predictors of residual structure than respondent-level variables.

  PublisherDOI

• Affective connotations according to LLMs: implications for meaning measurement and cultural bias

  Cognition & Emotion · 2025-10-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The affective connotations of words are central to meaning and important predictors of many social processes. As such, understanding the degree to which commercially-available generative language models (LLMs) replicate human judgements of affective connotations may help better understand human-model interactions. LLMs may also serve as useful tools for researchers seeking affective meaning estimates. We test the ability of three LLMs - GPT-4o, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.1 - to estimate human affective connotation ratings of words representing social identities, behaviours, modifiers, and settings in three language cultures: English (US), French (France), and German (Germany). We find that LLM ratings of terms correlate strongly with human ratings. However, their ratings tend to be overly extreme and patterns of correlations between meaning dimensions only loosely approximate those of human ratings. Consistent with previous findings of English-language and American biases in LLMs, we find that LLMs tend to perform better on English terms, though this pattern varies somewhat by meaning dimension and the type of term in question. We explore how LLMs might contribute to scholarship on affective connotations - by acting as tools for measurement - and how scholarship on affective connotations might contribute to generative language models - by guiding exploration of model biases.

  PublisherDOI

• Meaning Change in U.S. Occupational Identities during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Was It Temporary or Durable?

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2024-02-14 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  The COVID-19 pandemic altered social and economic life in the United States, displacing many people from their typical relationship to the institution of work. Our research uses affect control theory’s measurement structure to examine how cultural meanings for occupational identities shifted during the pandemic on the dimensions of evaluation (good-bad), potency (powerful-powerless), and activity (lively-inactive). Quinn et al. found that most occupations were seen as less good and powerful in the early stages of the pandemic than they were shortly before it began, with greater evaluation loss for nonessential occupations and greater potency loss for occupations classified as essential by state executive orders. We add a third wave to these data to reassess meanings after the pandemic eased and vaccines were developed. We use linear mixed modeling to estimate meaning changes across all three waves and to explore whether these changes differed for essential versus nonessential occupations. We find that evaluation and potency ratings of occupations rebounded over the longer term—a pattern that fits a control model of stable cultural meaning. Our results contribute to discussions in cultural sociology about beliefs and their stability.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceived Occupational Gender Composition: A Census and Exploration

  2024-11-21

  book-chapter

  Abstract Purpose Answering two questions: What do people believe is the gender makeup of different occupations? If there is a systematic difference between the actual and perceived gender composition what factors predict or mediate this difference? Methodology/Approach We integrate three occupation-level datasets: ratings of perceived gender composition and cultural sentiments (EPA ratings) for every 2010 Census occupation collected for this study, occupational characteristics from O*NET, and demographic characteristics from the 2015 to 2019 Current Population Survey. Regression models examine the association between sentiments and objective occupational traits on the perceived gender composition net of the actual gender composition. Findings While respondents underestimate extreme values, perceptions largely reflect actual composition. Gendered sentiments had a significant independent effect on gender composition perceptions. Examining the relationship between objective occupational features, sentiments, and perceptions allows scholars to better understand the links between structural conditions, gendered beliefs, and social action. If individuals underestimate the extent of gender segregation and view some occupations as more diverse than they are, they may be more willing to consider occupations inconsistent with their gender identity. On the other hand, if they misperceive gender composition because of cultural sentiments, they may choose an occupational course somewhat different from their intentions. Originality/Value of the Chapter Research on gender composition typically employs either a macro approach based on governmental statistics or a micro approach that examines a limited number of occupations. This is the first study to conduct a complete census of every Census occupation for perceived gender composition and cultural sentiments.

  PublisherDOI

• Are Victims Virtuous or Vilified? The Stories We Tell Ourselves (and Each Other)

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2024-02-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Derogation of the victim refers to the tendency of an observer to negatively evaluate someone hurt by the action of another. Victim derogation has been a core feature of social psychology for decades, but evidence suggests this phenomenon is weakening. It may even be reversing into a valorization of victims. Is this empirical pattern due to methodological changes and shifts in theoretical framing of victim studies, or have there been large-scale cultural changes in how we view victims? This review outlines the theoretical and methodological origins of the derogation effect. It then discusses contemporary research streams that show the malleability of victim perception in research that considers the entire harmful social interaction. These studies suggest that shifts in broader social, political, and cultural environments may have impacted the social psychological foundations of derogation.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction of Neil J. MacKinnon, 2021 Cooley-Mead Award Recipient

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2022-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Status as Deference: Cultural Meaning as a Source of Occupational Behavior

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022-11-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Status is an independent basis of inequality. Cultural meanings create the voluntary esteem and deference that distinguish status inequities from inequalities in power and material resources, as Cecilia Ridgeway and Hazel Markus explain in the introduction to this issue. Here, we use affect control theory (ACT)—a formal theory of culture, identity, and social action—to explore how cultural meanings of occupational identities shape status behavior. ACT assumes that people try to maintain cultural meanings for identities and behaviors on three affective dimensions (evaluation, potency and activity) as they interact with others. We use ACT to define how actors in different status groups—occupations with similar patterns of deference to and from other occupations—act toward one another. We validate our theoretical behavioral predictions with vignette survey data.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Affect Control Theories: A Double Special Issue in Honor of David R. Heise

  American Behavioral Scientist · 2022-01-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We introduce this two-part special issue that celebrates David Heise and his pathbreaking theories: affect control theory (ACT), affect control theory of the self (ACTS), and affect control theory of institutions (ACTI). These interlocking, multi-level, mathematically based theories explain a range of social processes, including impression formation, social interaction, trait and mood attributions, emotional experiences, emotion management, and identity adoption, and they do so in multiple languages and cultures. The 15 articles in this two-part issue test, apply, and develop the theories in new and innovative ways. After briefly summarizing each theory and Bayesian affect control theory (BayesACT), we highlight the key findings from each of the articles that follow.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Cultural Meanings of Occupations in the U.S. Changed During the Covid-19 Pandemic

  American Behavioral Scientist · 2022-02-22 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social research highlights the stability of cultural beliefs, broadly arguing that population-level changes are uncommon and mostly explained by cohort replacement rather than individual-level change. We find evidence suggesting that cultural change may also occur rapidly in response to an economically and socially transformative period. Using data collected just before and after the outbreak of Covid-19 in the U.S., we explore whether cultural beliefs about essential and non-essential occupations are dynamic in the face of an exogenous social and economic shock. Using a sample of respondents whose characteristics match the U.S. Census on sex, age, and race/ethnicity, we fielded surveys measuring cultural beliefs about 85 essential and non-essential occupations using the evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA) dimensions from the Affect Control Theory paradigm. We expected that EPA ratings of essential work identities would increase due to positive media coverage of essential occupations as indispensable and often selfless roles in the pandemic, while EPA ratings of non-essential identities would decline. Our findings show patterns that are both clear and inconsistent with our predictions. For both essential and non-essential occupations, almost all statistically significant changes in mean evaluation and potency were negative; activity showed relatively little change. Changes in evaluation scores were more negative for non-essential occupations than essential occupations. Results suggest that pervasive and persistent exogenous events are worth investigating as potential sources of episodic cultural belief change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI