Internal organization and affectivity of social representations: an exploratory study

Abstract

We are interested by the affective component of social representations (SR). Several researches consider that emotions are involved in information processing, thus contributing to the internal organization of SR. Complementarily, we consider that the affective component of a SR is composed by “sentiments”: affectively and socially constructed schemas, predisposing the individuals to feel certain emotions and to act accordingly. In this frame, we test the hypothesis according to which the internal organization of a SR is partially a function of the sentiments shared or not by these elements. A questionnaire study was realized concerning the SR of driving. The comparison between the results obtained by an association task of representational elements and by an affective characterization of these ones confirms this hypothesis. In consequence, the internal organization of a SR also appears to be affectively constituted.