A Multilevel Investigation of Arabic-Language Impression Change

Abstract

This research investigates how impressions are formed from simple social events described in the Arabic language. Multilevel data enable us to investigate the degree of cultural consensus in how native Arabic-speakers currently living in North Carolina view social events. These data allow us to investigate a core assumption of affect control theory—that affective responses to social events are shared within a language culture. The results of hierarchical linear modeling suggest little variation in the constant and stability effects during event processing among these Arabic-speakers from very diverse backgrounds. Evaluation constants and stability effects show no significant individual-level variation and can be described by a simple event-level model. In particular, evaluation processing is similar for Arabic-speaking men and women and for Muslims and Christians. Potency and activity dynamics show slight differences by gender and religion. We then proceed to estimate Arabic evaluation dynamics using regression techniques, and compare them to U.S. English equations. Arabic equations are consistently simpler than U.S. English ones, and stability effects are consistently smaller. In the Arabic equations, nice behaviors make actors seem more powerful, while the reverse is true in U.S. English equations. In general, the object of an action appears to be more important in Arabic than in English impression-change models.

Keywords:

• Affect control
• culture
• impression change
• mathematical sociology

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jody Clay-Warner and Justine Tinkler for helpful feedback on the first author’s master’s thesis from which parts of this article are drawn.

Additional information

Funding

Direct correspondence to the last author at [email protected]. The second through seventh coauthors are arranged alphabetically. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-09-1-0556 to Lynn Smith-Lovin (PI), David R. Heise, and Dawn T. Robinson, and by the Army Research Office Grant W911NF-15-1-0180 to Dawn T. Robinson (PI) and Lynn Smith-Lovin.

Notes on contributors

Darys J. Kriegel

Darys J. Kriegel received a B.A. degree in sociology from the University of Iowa and an M.A. degree in sociology from the University of Georgia. He has served as a Data Archive intern at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, as an instructor at the University of Georgia, and an Institutional Review Board analyst for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His research interests are in the areas of group processes, health, veterans issues, and culture.

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is an assistant professor of information science in the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS), University of British Columbia (UBC). Before UBC, he held various positions in the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, where he also completed a dual Ph.D. in computational linguistics and information science in 2015, the Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University, and the World Well-Being Project, the University of Pennsylvania. His interests are at the intersection of natural language processing, deep learning, and social media mining.

Jesse K. Clark

Jesse K. Clark is a lecturer in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2015. His Ph.D. dissertation received the Mathematical Sociology Outstanding Dissertation in Progress Award in 2014. His research interests are primarily focused on the relationship between social structures and personal characteristics. This includes major sociological areas such as status and inequalities, culture, emotions, and health. In particular, he uses theories to develop methods by which individuals can overcome the negative effects of social structures.

Robert E. Freeland

Robert E. Freeland is an assistant professor of sociology at Elizabeth City State University. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2014. His research centers on using advances in microlevel social psychology to examine issues of macrolevel social inequality. Current research uses quantitative measures of cultural sentiments to develop a new occupational status measure based on the likelihood that one occupational actor would defer to another within a matrix of occupations and how the multidimensional structure of sentiments can help explain the occupational gender wage gap. His research has been published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Journal of Small Business Management, and the Handbook of Social Psychology and Inequality.

David R. Heise

David R. Heise, Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Indiana University, is a past editor of Sociological Methodology and of Sociological Methods and Research. His methodological research ranges from issues in quantitative modeling to computer applications in qualitative research to surveying norms and cultures. His social psychological research focuses on the affective and logical foundations of social interaction, in particular, affect control theory (ACT) and event structure analysis (ESA). He has received Distinguished Career awards from four sections of the American Sociological Association: Social Psychology, Sociology of Emotions, Mathematical Sociology, and Sociological Methodology, and he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Academy for Intercultural Research. His publications include six books: Causal Analysis, Understanding Events, Analyzing Social Interaction (with Lynn Smith-Lovin), Expressive Order (the recipient of the 2010 Harrison White Outstanding Book Award from the Mathematical Sociology section of the ASA), Surveying Cultures, and Self, Identity and Social Institutions (with Neil MacKinnon).

Dawn T. Robinson

Dawn T. Robinson is professor of sociology and a fellow in the Owens Institute of Behavioral Research at University of Georgia. Her recent research focuses on justice and emotion, nonreactive measures of emotion in social interaction, and models of cross-cultural interaction. She was selected by the National Academy of Sciences as a 2009 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. Her coedited book (with Jody Clay-Warner), Social Structure and Emotion, received the 2010 Book Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA) section on Sociology of Emotion. She is past chair of the ASA sections on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, Social Psychology, and Sociology of Emotion.

Kimberly B. Rogers

Kimberly B. Rogers is an assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2013. Her research explores how macrosocial inequalities may be either reproduced or overturned through behavior and emotion dynamics in interactions and small groups. Her recent work uses Bayesian methods to build mathematical models of impression formation, which account for variation and fluctuation in identity meanings during social interaction. This line of research shows how stable interaction patterns can emerge from uncertain perceptions of identities, and explores the potential for gradual meaning change through social experience. Her other publications examine behavioral and emotional responses to stereotyped groups and unfair reward distributions, evaluate the degree of consensus in identity sentiments within and between cultures, consider emotions as both symptoms and sources of inequality, and theorize emotions as products of interdependent cultural, relational, situational, and biological processes.

Lynn Smith-Lovin

Lynn Smith-Lovin is Robert L. Wilson Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. She has received the Cooley-Mead Award from the American Sociological Assocation (ASA) section on Social Psychology, the James Coleman Award from the ASA section on Mathematical Sociology, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the ASA sections on Emotions and on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity. Her research examines the relationships among identity, action, and emotion. Current projects involve (1) experimental studies of justice, identity, and emotion (funded by the National Science Foundation) and (2) a study of event processing in Arabic (funded by the Office of Naval Research), and (3) simulation and validation studies for affect control theory (funded by the Army Research Office). She has served as president of the Southern Sociological Society, vice president of the ASA, and chair of the ASA sections on the Sociology of Emotion and on Social Psychology.