The "Structural Approach" of social representations defines a social representation as an organization which comprises different dimensions and not as a group of purely cognitive events and processes. In the present state of theory, we propose the principle that the affective dimension maintains a random relationship with the Central Core. Two previous studies are briefly described as well as the results concerning three representations ("street children", "higher education" and "family") in order to present a perspective that seems to indicate that the relationships between "semantic" and "affectively charged" elements are random. The data seem to confirm the principle that the Central Core of social representations equally organizes the distribution of the affective charges on the social representation as a whole. The studies presented here correspond to a first exploratory approach of the relationships between the structure of a representation and the affective impregnation of representation elements.
Social representations; structural approach; affective impregnation; central core
