Modified social identities: Amalgamations, attributions, and emotions

Role identities may be modified by supplementary statuses, personality traits, and mood descriptions to define particularized identities for people in social interaction. This paper reports empirical development of equations for combining sentiments attached to a role identity and a modifier in order to yield an amalgamate sentiment for the particularized identity. Amalgamate sentiments are shown to operate in event processing like sentiments for simple identities. The amalgamation equations are solved mathematically to define the modifier that an identity requires in order to generate a given particularization, and it is proposed that these equations define attribution processes, including the attribution of emotions.

Keywords:

• Attribution
• Emotion
• Impressions
• Status Characteristics
• Traits