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Political affiliation impacts how people understand and describe events, but it is unclear where in the event understanding process these dif- ferences originate. Using the framework of affect control theory, the authors test for political differences in three places relevant to event understanding: labeling, fundamental sentiments about labels, and transient impressions about actors and behaviors in events.

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.

People are poor judges of both their own skills and the mental states of others. This creates important differences in perceptions of influence in conversations about politics. In this study, I explore how political knowledge and sociodemographic characteristics pattern perceptions of influence in political conversation.

Protests against police brutality, such as those that followed the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, can affect public opinion of police. By acting as a form of identity threat, they may also affect police officers’ meanings of their own occupational identities.

Substantial research details individuals’ estimates of affective cultural meanings and how they vary along demographic and socioeconomic lines. However, much less is known about individuals’ levels of uncertainty about these meanings—what I refer to as ambiguity—or how ambiguity is patterned among respondents or concepts, though it is likely ambiguity has consequences for interaction and cultural change.