David Reuben Jerome Heise (March 15, 1937 – September 28, 2021) was a social psychologist who originated the idea that affectual processes control interpersonal behavior.
He retired from undergraduate teaching in 2002, but continued research and graduate student consulting as Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Indiana University.
His first publication was a by-lined full page report in the Chicago Sun-Times concerning a 1960 high-temperature physics conference held by the Laboratories.
[citation needed] After beginning graduate courses related to communications studies in 1961, Heise's interests generalized to social psychology, and he became a fellow in a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) training program directed by University of Chicago sociologist Fred Strodtbeck.
He worked for two years as an associate professor at Queens College, City University of New York, where his colleague Patricia Kendall linked him to her husband Paul Lazarsfeld.
After joining the sociology department at Indiana University in 1981, he directed another NIMH training program in methodology from 1988 to 1993, and was awarded a James H. Rudy Endowed Professorship in 1990.
[1] Heise worked extensively with Charles E. Osgood's semantic differential for measuring affective associations of words (connotative meanings).
The impression formation research seeks empirically based equations for predicting how various kinds of events influence individuals' feelings about people, behaviors, and settings.
[5] At the University of North Carolina, Heise began work on affect control theory, a cybernetic approach to impression management through interpersonal action.
NIMH research funding during the late 1970s supported data collection for a variety of graduate student projects related to affect control theory.
"[14] In an essay on the sociology of emotions, T. David Kemper wrote, "Indubitably, Heise has the most methodologically rigorous program of all sociologists, with the added attraction of its mathematical precision.
His account, moreover, is formalized in equations and implemented in a computer program capable of making numerical predictions about ongoing human interactions.
Building on production systems in cognitive science, especially as applied by other sociologists,[17] Heise developed a framework called Event Structure Analysis for analyzing reiterative social processes.
The analytic problem is to draw the implicit logical structure out of the narrative into an explicit model characterizing the incident and similar happenings.