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Lynn Smith-Lovin

Lynn Smith-Lovin

Robert L. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Sociology
smithlov@duke.edu
Box 90088, Duke University, Durham, NC 27710-0088
2200 West Main St (Suite 700), Durham, NC 27705

Selected Publications

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

Journal Article Cognition & emotion · October 2025 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 connot ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article Social Networks · July 1, 2025 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 ... Full text Cite

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

Chapter · January 1, 2025 We generally know what to expect when interacting with different types of people, but sometimes we are surprised. Affect control theory is a formal, mathematical theory that explains how people deal with a world that is usually predictable, but sometimes g ... Full text Cite

IDENTIFIABLE IDENTITIES AND CONSEQUENT EMOTIONS IN HOOKUP CULTURE’S TAXONOMY OF UNDEFINED RELATIONSHIPS

Chapter · December 6, 2024 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/App ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · December 1, 2024 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 ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article American Behavioral Scientist · January 1, 2023 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, ma ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article The American behavioral scientist · January 2023 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 al ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article Rsf · November 1, 2022 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 ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · March 1, 2022 Full text Cite

The emotional implications of occupational deference structures

Conference Advances in Group Processes · January 1, 2021 Purpose: We examine how one’s occupational class affects emotional experience. To do this, we look at both general affective outcomes (job satisfaction, respect at work, and life happiness) and the experience of specific positive emotions (overjoyed, proud ... Full text Cite

The Enormous Flock of Homophily Researchers: Assessing and Promoting a Research Agenda

Chapter · January 1, 2021 McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook’s (2001) Annual Review of Sociology piece “Birds of a Feather” (“Birds”, hereafter) focused on the phenomenon of homophily – the empirical reality that connections are more likely between similar others than dissimilar othe ... Full text Cite

The role of the other: How interaction partners influence identity maintenance in four cultures

Chapter · April 22, 2020 Since its inception, identity theory has emphasized the crucial role of relationships with others in shaping social behavior. Sheldon Stryker's original formulation of identity theory gave a central role to social networks in determining structural commitm ... Full text Cite

How Do We “Do Gender”? Permeation as Over-talking and Talking Over

Journal Article Socius · January 1, 2019 Gendered expectations are imported from the larger culture to permeate small-group discussions, creating conversational inequalities. Conversational roles also emerge from the negotiated order of group interactions to reflect, reinforce, and occasionally c ... Full text Cite

Action, Interaction, and Groups

Chapter · January 1, 2019 This chapter concentrates on developments in two areas where major advances have come in the past four decades, and where controversies still brew. The two areas include: the new control theories of social interaction, which have revolutionized the symboli ... Full text Cite

Does the job matter? Diversity officers and racialized stress

Chapter · January 1, 2018 Research indicates that work in predominantly white professional settings generates stress for minority professionals. However, certain occupations may enable or constrain these race-related stressors. In this paper, we use affect control theory to examine ... Full text Cite

A Multilevel Investigation of Arabic-Language Impression Change

Journal Article International Journal of Sociology · August 29, 2017 Full text Cite

Writing in Sociology: A Brief Guide

Book · November 2016 Writing in Sociology: A Brief Guide shows students how to write research reports, literature reviews, internship reports, and other genres often assigned in sociology classes with extensive real-world examples and attention to principles of audience, purpo ... Link to item Cite

Analyzing social interaction: Advances in affect control theory

Book · May 6, 2016 First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. ... Full text Cite

Impressions from events

Chapter · May 6, 2016 A large study of event stimuli developed new equations for describing how people react to events. Exploratory work found several new interaction terms affecting the impression formation process. To demonstrate the generality of the impression formation pro ... Full text Cite

Editors' Preface

Book · May 6, 2016 Cite

The affective control of events within settings

Chapter · May 6, 2016 This paper develops an affect control model of how behavior changes as actors move from setting to setting. After a review o f other theoretical approaches to the problem, the affective meanings of settings are examined. Then, impression change equations a ... Full text Cite

Affect control theory: An assessment

Chapter · May 6, 2016 This paper reviews affect control theory's major strengths, the contributions of recent work to its growth, and the most promising avenues for future work. Affect control theory's strengths include (1) the precision of its mathematical statement and empiri ... Cite

Surgical Team Stability and Risk of Sharps-Related Blood and Body Fluid Exposures During Surgical Procedures.

Journal Article Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · May 2016 OBJECTIVE: To explore whether surgical teams with greater stability among their members (ie, members have worked together more in the past) experience lower rates of sharps-related percutaneous blood and body fluid exposures (BBFE) during surgical procedur ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Justice Standard Determines Emotional Responses to Over-Reward

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · March 1, 2016 How do people feel when they benefit from an unfair reward distribution? Equity theory predicts negative emotion in response to over-reward, but sociological research using referential standards of justice drawn from status-value theory repeatedly finds po ... Full text Cite

Surgical Procedure Characteristics and Risk of Sharps-Related Blood and Body Fluid Exposure.

Journal Article Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · January 2016 OBJECTIVE To use a unique multicomponent administrative data set assembled at a large academic teaching hospital to examine the risk of percutaneous blood and body fluid (BBF) exposures occurring in operating rooms. DESIGN A 10-year retrospective cohort de ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Theory in Sociology of Emotions

Chapter · January 1, 2016 In this chapter, we selectively review the contributions of three traditions to sociology of emotions – dramaturgy, symbolic interactionism, and group processes. In summarizing the key contributions of these literatures, we highlight possible areas for the ... Full text Cite

Introduction to the special section on the sociology of emotions

Journal Article Emotion Review · January 1, 2014 Full text Cite

Social Distance in the United States: Sex, Race, Religion, Age, and Education Homophily among Confidants, 1985 to 2004

Journal Article American Sociological Review · January 1, 2014 Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily-the actual level of contact between people i ... Full text Cite

Emotions and Affect as Source, Outcome and Resistance to Inequality

Chapter · January 1, 2014 While sociologists usually focus on the material aspects of inequality, its emotional outcomes are one of the reasons we care about it. People who occupy the lower positions in unequal social structures experience negative, impotent, and unengaged feelings ... Full text Cite

Sociolect-based community detection

Conference IEEE Isi 2013 2013 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics Big Data Emergent Threats and Decision Making in Security Informatics · September 9, 2013 'Sociolects' are specialized vocabularies used by social subgroups defined by common interests or origins. We applied methods to retrieve large quantities of Twitter data based on expert-identified sociolects and then applied and developed network-analysis ... Full text Cite

Action, Interaction, and Groups

Chapter · February 2, 2012 Full text Cite

Answering the call for a sociological perspective on the multilevel social construction of emotion: A Comment on Boiger and Mesquita

Journal Article Emotion Review · January 1, 2012 Boiger and Mesquita (2012) present a social constructionist perspective on emotion that argues for its multilevel contextualization through social interactions, relationships, and culture. The present comments offer a response to the authors' call for inpu ... Full text Cite

Three faces of identity

Journal Article Annual Review of Sociology · August 20, 2010 We review three traditions in research on identity. The first two traditions, which stress (a) the internalization of social positions and their meanings as part of the self structure and (b) the impact of cultural meanings and social situations on actors' ... Full text Cite

"The Many Faces of Identity"

Journal Article Annual Review of Sociology · 2010 Cite

Emotional Reactions to Over-Reward

Other Social Psychology Quarterly · 2010 Cite

Podcast

Other Thomson Reuters "Sciencewatch" · 2010 Cite

Podcast

Other Thomson Reuters "Sciencewatch" · 2010 Cite

The social psychologies of emotion: A bridge that is not too far

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · January 1, 2010 Full text Cite

Models and marginals: Using survey evidence to study social networks

Journal Article American Sociological Review · December 1, 2009 Fischer (2009) argues that our estimates of confidant network size in the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS), and therefore the trend in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004, are implausible because they are (1) inconsistent with other data and (2) conta ... Full text Cite

Why do nominal characteristics acquire status value? A minimal explanation for status construction.

Journal Article AJS; American journal of sociology · November 2009 Why do beliefs that attach different amounts of status to different categories of people become consensually held by the members of a society? We show that two microlevel mechanisms, in combination, imply a system-level tendency toward consensual status be ... Full text Open Access Cite

"Loosening the ties that bind"

Journal Article Contexts · 2008 Cite

"Social Isolation"

Chapter · 2008 Cite

Commentary

Chapter · January 1, 2008 Social structural positions, cultural meanings of those positions, and interactional situations that evoke them, influence the personal experience of emotion. This chapter highlights the interactional imbeddedness of emotional experience and attempts to de ... Full text Cite

The strength of weak identities: Social structural sources of self, situation and emotional experience

Conference Social Psychology Quarterly · January 1, 2007 Modern societies are highly differentiated, with relatively uncorrected socially salient dimensions and a preponderance of weak, unidimensional (as opposed to strong, multiplex) ties. What are the implications of a society with fewer strong ties and more w ... Full text Cite

Social Networks

Chapter · 2006 Cite

Social isolation in America: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades

Journal Article American Sociological Review · January 1, 2006 Have the core discussion networks of Americans changed in the past two decades? In 1985, the General Social Survey (GSS) collected the first nationally representative data on the confidants with whom Americans discuss important matters. In the 2004 GSS the ... Full text Cite

“Affect Control Theory.”

Chapter · December 2005 Cite

Recognition of Gender Identity and Task Performance

Book · December 1, 2005 Gender constitutes one of the fundamental distinctions that organize social interaction. It is a salient social distinction in all societies, is a core personal identity for social actors, and is often used to generate expectations for competence in task-f ... Full text Cite

Foreword

Chapter · 2005 Cite

"Gender Identity Recognition and Task Performance"

Journal Article Advances in Group Processes: Social Identification in Groups · 2005 Cite

Introduction of Karen S. Cook: Recipient of the 2004 Cooley-Mead Award

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · January 1, 2005 Full text Cite

PHYSIOLOGICAL MEASURES OF THEORETICAL CONCEPTS: SOME IDEAS FOR LINKING DEFLECTION AND EMOTION TO PHYSICAL RESPONSES DURING INTERACTION

Journal Article Advances in Group Processes · December 1, 2004 After a vigorous debate in the late 1970s, the sociology of emotion put aside most discussion of whether or not the physiological arousal associated with emotion labels is differentiated. Since this early period, scholars have made great progress on two fr ... Full text Cite

Measuring interruptions: Structural versus contextual approaches

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · January 2002 Cite

Measuring interruption: Syntactic and contextual methods of coding conversation

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · January 1, 2002 In this paper we focus on a long-standing debate surrounding the measurement of interruptions in conversational behavior. This debate has implications for conversational analysts interested in turn-taking structures, researchers interested in close relatio ... Full text Cite

Cohesion and membership duration: Linking groups, relations and individuals in an ecology of affiliation

Journal Article Advances in Group Processes · January 1, 2002 The study of group cohesion has a rich but confused history. Cohesion was originally a group-level concept, referring to the degree to which a group tends to maintain a stable, committed membership over time. As a largely psychological literature developed ... Full text Cite

Getting a Laugh: A Look at Humor in Task Group Discussions

Journal Article Social Forces · September 2001 Cite

Defining the Situation: Emotional Display and Construals about Crime

Journal Article Sociological Spectrum · January 2001 Cite

“Role-identities, action and emotion: parallel processing and the production of mixed emotions”

Journal Article Self and Identity: Personal, Social, and Symbolic · January 2001 Cite

Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks

Journal Article Annual Review of Sociology · January 1, 2001 Similarity breeds connection. This principle - the homophily principle - structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result ... Full text Cite

Criminal identity: The key to situational construals in mock criminal court cases

Journal Article Sociological Spectrum · January 1, 2001 A number of researchers have explored legal decision making, attempting to predict factors that influence sentencing. For example, Dunning (1986) focused on one major factor, the decision maker's construal of the crime. Dunning's research demonstrated the ... Full text Cite

Getting a laugh: Gender, status, and humor in task discussions

Journal Article Social Forces · January 1, 2001 Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon, since every joke requires both a teller and an audience. Here we ask how humor operates in task-oriented group discussions. We use theories about the functions of humor to generate hypotheses about who jokes, ... Full text Cite

Changing the subject: Gender, status, and the dynamics of topic change

Journal Article American Sociological Review · January 1, 2001 Social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to how much people talk, but have paid little attention to what they talk about. Research in the tradition of conversation analysis suggests that transitions between topics of conversation are accomp ... Full text Cite

Simplicity, uncertainty, and the power of generative theories

Journal Article Contemporary Sociology · January 1, 2000 Full text Cite

Emotion display as a strategy for identity negotiation (vol 23, pg 73, 1999)

Journal Article MOTIVATION AND EMOTION · December 1, 1999 Link to item Cite

Introduction of David R. Heise: Recipient of the 1998 Cooley-Mead Award

Journal Article SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY · March 1, 1999 Link to item Cite

“Sociology of emotions.”

Chapter · January 1999 Cite

Interaction in the gender system: Theory and research

Journal Article Annual Review of Sociology · January 1999 Cite

Gender and interaction

Chapter · 1999 Cite

“Introduction: David R. Heise, Cooley-Mead Award Winner.”

Other Social Psychology Quarterly · 1999 Cite

Emotion display as a strategy for identity negotiation

Journal Article Motivation and Emotion · January 1, 1999 Affect control theory provides a formal model of emotions, behavior, and identity shifts during social interaction. According to the theory, emotions provide information about both the identity of an emoting actor and how well current social events are con ... Full text Cite

The gender system and interaction

Journal Article Annual Review of Sociology · January 1, 1999 The gender system includes processes that both define males and females as different in socially significant ways and justify inequality on the basis of that difference. Gender is different from other forms of social inequality in that men and women intera ... Full text Cite

Core concepts and common ground: The relational basis of our discipline

Journal Article Social Forces · January 1, 1999 The core of sociology is the key thing that we share as sociologists - the basic way of viewing social life that makes us distinctive as a discipline. This core is the content that we have to communicate to a larger public. largue that the disciplinary for ... Full text Cite

How bad was it? The effects of victim and perpetrator emotion on responses to criminal court vignettes

Journal Article Social Forces · January 1, 1998 Affect control theory is a general model of how emotions, identities and actions are related in social interaction. In this study, we used affect control theory to predict how the emotions displayed by a perpetrator and a victim during their criminal trial ... Full text Cite

Gender and Social Interaction

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · January 1, 1996 Cite

"Sex and Race Heterogeneity in Face-to-Face Groups"

Journal Article Social Forces · 1995 Cite

Handbook of Emotions (New York: Guilford, 1993)

Journal Article Contemporary Sociology · 1995 Cite

Sex and race homogeneity in naturally occurring groups

Journal Article Social Forces · January 1, 1995 We generate a number of hypotheses about face-to-face groups using the energy distribution principle: the frequency of an event is inversely related to the amount of energy expended in that event. The principle predicts that (1) the size of groups will be ... Full text Cite

Heinous crime or unfortunate accident? the effects of remorse on responses to mock criminal confessions

Journal Article Social Forces · January 1, 1994 Affect control theory provides a rigorous, testable model of emotion. We use simulations based on this theory to develop predictions about the impact of emotion displays on identity attributions and subsequent sentencing recommendations in the context of c ... Full text Cite

Can Emotionality and Rationality be Reconciled?

Journal Article · April 1993 Economists invoke emotions narrowly to solve commitment problems; sociologists view emotions as a more pervasive basic feature of social life. A complete approach to integrating emotionality and choice requires attention to the interactional sources of emo ... Cite

Can Emotionality and Rationality be Reconciled?: A Comment on Collins, Frank, Hirshleifer, and Jasso

Journal Article Rationality and Society · January 1, 1993 Economists invoke emotions narrowly to solve commitment problems; sociologists view emotions as a more pervasive basic feature of social life. A complete approach to integrating emotionality and choice requires attention to the interactional sources of emo ... Full text Cite

Researching Social Life

Journal Article · 1992 Cite

"Introduction: Joseph Berger, Cooley-Mead Award Winner."

Other Social Psychology Quarterly · 1992 Cite

"Affect, Sentiment and Emotion."

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · 1989 Cite

Impressions from events

Journal Article Journal of Mathematical Sociology · December 1, 1987 A large study of event stimuli developed new equations for describing how people react to events. Exploratory work found several new interaction terms affecting the impression formation process. To demonstrate the generality of the impression formation pro ... Full text Cite

The affective control of events within settings

Journal Article Journal of Mathematical Sociology · December 1, 1987 This paper develops an affect control model of how behavior changes as actors move from setting to setting. After a review of other theoretical approaches to the problem, the affective meanings of settings are examined. Then, impression change equations ar ... Full text Cite

Affect control theory: An assessment

Journal Article Journal of Mathematical Sociology · December 1, 1987 This paper reviews affect control theory's major strengths, the contributions of recent work to its growth, and the most promising avenues for future work. Affect control theory's strengths include (1) the precision of its mathematical statement and empiri ... Full text Cite

"Homophily in Voluntary Organizations."

Journal Article American Sociological Review · 1987 Cite

Status and participation in six-person groups: A test of skvoretz’s comparative status model

Journal Article Social Forces · January 1, 1986 A mathematical model of participation in n-person groups, derived from expectation states theory by Skvoretz (a), was tested in six-person task-oriented groups with systematically varying sex compositions. The groups of undergraduate subjects performed a t ... Full text Cite

"Sex Segregation in Voluntary Associations."

Journal Article American Sociological Review · 1986 Cite

The Employment Revolution. (MIT Press, 1982)

Journal Article Social Forces · 1984 Cite

WOMENS RETIREMENT - POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF RECENT RESEARCH - SZINOVACZ,M

Journal Article JOURNALS OF GERONTOLOGY · January 1, 1984 Link to item Cite

Scaling the prestige, authority, and income potential of college curricula

Journal Article Social Science Research · January 1, 1983 This paper develops the concept of "targeted education," a theoretical ranking of college curricula, into a multidimensional framework. The new scales, based on the traditional stratification dimensions, prestige, authority, and income, are then used in a ... Full text Cite

"Models of Women’s Work and Fertility"

Journal Article American Sociological Review · 1982 Cite

Women’s Retirement: Policy Implications of Recent Research, Vol. 6.

Journal Article Sage Yearbooks in Women’s Policy Studies. · 1982 Cite

Understanding Human Values, Individual and Societal.

Journal Article Social Forces · 1981 Cite

"Behavioral Settings and Impressions Formed from Social Scenarios."

Journal Article Social Psychology Quarterly · 1979 Cite

Individual Political Participation: The Effects of Social Structure and Communication Behavior

Journal Article Sociological Perspectives · January 1, 1979 Although researchers attempting to quantify theories of individual political participation have assumed that mass media use is a recursive cause of such participation, an argument could be made for a return effect of political activity on media use. The “u ... Full text Cite

"The Changing Front Page of the New York Times."

Journal Article Journalism Quarterly · 1976 Cite

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

Journal Article American Review of Sociology 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 ... Link to item Cite