INTERPERSONAL CONFLICT
The findings just described have direct implications for analyzing interpersonal conflicts.
Self-Regulatory Failure in Interpersonal Conflict
Interpersonal conflict often involves complex, mixed-motive situations, in which the relationship between one’s own set of goals and another’s are simultaneously positively interdependent and negatively interdependent.
(See Chapter One of this book) Sayings such as “You always hurt the ones you love” indicate the common wisdom that the interdependence coming from interpersonal closeness creates the very situation in which emotions are strong and the tendency to react impulsively in hurtful, damaging ways is greatest. Although people may attempt to control the hot, emotional responses that intensify conflict and damage relationships, they often find that their good intentions are not enough to refrain from blowing up, making personal attacks, or otherwise doing what they later regret.Regulating expression of negative feelings is difficult in the heat of conflict. The conflict situation itself creates a general level of stress that readily shifts the balance from cool-system to hot-system dominance. Under high stress, specific things are often said and done during conflict that push specific psychological buttons, which in turn trigger hot, emotional reactions. Failure to exert self-control over such reactions can instigate similarly hot responses from the other party, thus intensifying the conflict, further undermining efforts at self-control, and making cool, collaborative responses even more difficult. High stress also tends to decrease one’s ability to solve complex problems. So people who argue when they are stressed and fatigued often find that they lack the self-control they might otherwise have. Their problem-solving ability is also impaired, so stress doubly undermines any attempt to resolve the conflict constructively.
Given the negative implications associated with stress for successfully resolving conflicts, it is not surprising that managing stress plays an important role in conflict resolution. Managing and reducing stress improves not only self-cooling and self-control, but also one’s ability to generate and assess possible solutions to the conflict. Because a high level of stress can shift the balance from coolsystem dominance to hot, managing stress effectively can mean the difference between suppressing hot impulses and lashing out uncontrollably. In this vein, Gottman and colleagues, working with married couples experiencing serious relationship-threatening conflicts, has found that stress management strategies, including exercise, mediation, and self-soothing rituals for unwinding or decompressing at the end of the day, can help improve conflict resolution and marital satisfaction. (For review, see Gottman and Silver, 2000).
In addition to stress, there are countless other reasons why people fail to selfregulate during conflict (for review, see Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996; Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice, 1993), among them ambivalence or lack of firm resolve (that is, motivation) to accomplish a particular goal. As mentioned earlier, one’s motivation to self-regulate increases if the situation or activity in question is considered personally relevant and meaningful. Because selfregulation and self-control require a certain amount of psychological and physiological energy, it comes as no surprise that when people are emotionally stressed, mentally drained, distracted, busy with other things, or just plain tired, they find it all the more difficult to overcome a powerful emotional impulse (Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996).
Anxiety, rumination, and preoccupation may undermine self-regulation as well, particularly if the conflict is a complex one that requires abundant mental resources for successful resolution (Lyubomirsky and Nolen-Hoeksema, 1995). As the perceived stakes increase, however, the anxiety level and the propensity to catastrophize also tends to increase, interfering with the ability to self-control and solve a complex problem.
The very nature of a conflict situation— emotional and stress-inducing—thus undermines self-control and suggests the common-sense advice to try to avoid dealing with potential conflict situations when one is busy, anxious, stressed, or physically exhausted—advice that is easy to give but difficult to execute given the “hot” conditions in which real-life conflicts generally are confronted, whether battling for the parking space or taxi on the way home or dealing with sudden world crises.Escalating Spirals in Conflict
Often, one little step crosses an imaginary line, leading to more frequent and severe transgression and the collapse of the good intentions. The dieter who cheats a little for a special occasion, the ex-smoker who sneaks just one little cigarette to help calm the nerves, or the alcoholic who takes one tiny sip to feel more at ease at the annual holiday party—these are the first steps to an unhappy ending; hence such idioms as “falling off the wagon.” Such snowballing, of course, occurs not just in internal conflicts, as in dieting struggles within the self, but also in interpersonal conflicts.
Altercations that readily become violent typically begin with relatively innocuous acts, followed by an escalating spiral of reciprocal provocation. The initial aggressive act may seem at the time essentially harmless, but elicits a hostile response that seems to justify an even more aggressive countermove, and so on, eventually snowballing into violence (for example, Zillman, 1994), and the cycle of emotional arousal, impulsive automatic responding, and aggression continues to escalate. It is evident, for example, in the divorced couple who simply cannot be in the same room together without the slightest provocation triggering a series of aggressive reactions that quickly spiral out of control. Such habitual escalating reactions between parties in a protracted conflict follow some of the same rules as all kinds of habitual responses. To illustrate, consider Pavlov’s dogs, who were exposed to food that made them salivate.
The food was repeatedly paired with a distinctive bell, so that when the bell rang, food was shown, and the dogs salivated. Eventually, the dogs learned to anticipate food whenever they heard a bell and would salivate merely at the sound of the bell, regardless of whether food was ever presented. In human relations, the trigger for the original angry response is the other’s behavior and its perceived harmful consequences. (See Allred, 2000.) Over time in these escalating cycles, however, the anger and hostility may become such strong conditioned responses that the presence of the other person, physically or in thought, may be sufficient to trigger them automatically unless cooling strategic interventions are introduced.Cooling Strategies and Techniques
Between six and eighteen months of age, infants begin to learn to regulate their emotions. Six-month-olds approached by a stranger tend to cope with their fear and anxiety by averting their eyes and “fussing.” Twelve- and eighteen-month- olds, on the other hand, use other strategies, such as self-distraction and selfsoothing, to deal with an anxiety-producing stranger. These more sophisticated cooling strategies allow children to effectively cope with their hot fear and anxiety reactions. Because conflict elicits similar fight-or-flight emotional responses, self-distraction, self-calming, and other cooling strategies are equally important skills for adults.
Time-Out
People who have stressful jobs are able to reduce conflict and improve their family relationships by taking brief time-outs after returning home from work. Without a time-out, going straight from a stressful workday to a family interaction often leads to argument and dispute. But spending part of an hour by themselves enables these stressed-out wage earners to calm down prior to dealing with their families, and subsequent family interactions are therefore much more pleasant.
In the middle of a conflict, calling for a time-out or even just stopping and counting to ten, can allow people the extra time they need to calm down and cool off.
If people take an extended time-out, they should take care not to engage in other arousing or anxiety-producing activities and avoid “silent seething” (Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice, 1993) in which the time-out is used to nurse the angry feelings and plot the next counterattack. Engaging in such silent seething, in which people focus specifically on the hot, concrete emotionarousing aspects of the conflict (for example, “I can’t believe she said that...” or “he’s being so stubborn...”) is likely to perpetuate hot responses by leading to rumination that further increases negative arousal and hostility (Kross, Ayduk, and Mischel, 2005; Rusting and Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998). Instead, people can use time-outs constructively to engage in behaviors that calm them down, reducing their arousal levels so that they can later rejoin hostile negotiations and contribute to them meaningfully, in ways that lead to adaptive resolutions. The specific behaviors that facilitate this will likely vary across people and depend on a host of factors including the individual’s personality, the type of conflict involved, as well as its intensity. Regardless of the specific behavior that people choose, however, the objective of a time-out remains the same—to pause and calm down, not to pause and reload, nor as a way of avoiding dealing with the conflict and abandoning the efforts to resolve it.Reflection
One way to facilitate more constructive conflict resolution is to become more self-aware. Stopping to reflect, comparing one’s behavior to important goals and standards, and trying to take the other person’s perspective can be helpful. People who stop to focus attention on themselves and succeed in adaptively reflecting on their current thoughts, feeling, goals, and behaviors are more likely to see themselves accurately, to act consistently with goals and standards, and to be faithful to shared standards such as societal norms or agreed ground rules of the relationship (for example, Carver and Scheier, 1981; Wicklund, 1979).
However, efforts to constructively analyze feelings can also easily become hazardous by entangling people in rumination that further increases negative affect (for example, Ayduk, Downey, and Mischel, 2002; Rusting and Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998). Given these conflicting findings, a key need is to understand how people can adaptively reflect rather than ruminate about their feelings.According to the hot/cool model, whether a person ends up ruminating or reflecting depends critically on two mechanisms: the individual’s arousal level and the individual’s construals of their experience (Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). As noted earlier, at high levels of arousal hot-system processing is accentuated while cool system processing is attenuated. Consequently, when a person experiences high negative arousal, as is often the case during conflict, it is assumed that efforts to rationally analyze negative feelings will be impaired. Instead of fostering abstract thinking and reasoning, such efforts are expected to lead individuals to construe negative experiences in predominantly concrete, descriptive terms (that is, focusing specifically on what one is feeling and what happened to them), which, in turn, feeds back and serves to further increase negative arousal. To illustrate, consider the following hypothetical example. Imagine that Joanne is in the midst of a frustrating negotiation with John. She finds herself becoming increasingly upset and is motivated to figure out why she is feeling so hostile in order to prevent the negotiation from blowing up. She takes a timeout and asks herself, “Why am I so angry at John?” In response, she tells herself, “because he’s arrogant and a control freak and his proposal is unfair.” Thus, although Joanne is motivated to understand her feelings, her attempts to do so do not lead to insightful understanding. Instead, they lead her to focus specifically on what it is about John and the situation that is upsetting her, causing her to become increasingly upset. In order to prevent this kind of ruminative response and enable adaptive reflection, the hot/cool model suggests that specific strategies are needed to reduce arousal while attention is directed to a more abstract and less concrete analysis of one’s feelings.
Recent studies by Kross and colleagues (2005) have begun to shed light on the psychological operations that enable such cool, reflective processing. In their research they demonstrate that two strategies play a critical role in enabling people to adaptively reflect, rather than ruminate, over negative feelings. One is the adoption of a self-distanced perspective, in which the individual becomes an observer of himself and the experience (rather than maintaining the usual selfimmersed perspective). The other is a “why” focus on the specific reasons underlying one’s negative feelings (rather than a “what” focus on the specific felt emotions experienced). Findings from a series of studies indicate that the combination of these strategies (that is, why-focus engaged in from a selfdistanced perspective or “distanced-why” strategy) enables people to analyze negative experiences and emotions in relatively cool, cognitive terms, making sense of them without overwhelming them with their aversiveness and refueling the problem. For example, Kross and colleagues (2005) have shown that instructing people to focus on the reasons underlying their negative feelings surrounding interpersonal conflicts (why focus) from self-distanced perspectives leads them to experience less anger, assessed both implicitly (indirectly) and explicitly (through self-report), and to construe their experiences less concretely (that is, “I can’t believe she said that to me.or “he’s so unreasonable...”) and more abstractly (such as, “I realize that she felt threatened by my presence...”; “looking back on it now, I could have responded differently by...”) relative to individuals who focus on the reasons underlying their emotions without adopting a self-distanced perspective.
The distanced-why strategy thus appears to offer one route for facilitating reflection and constructive problem solving. Theoretically, a number of techniques may be similarly useful so long as they function to attenuate arousal levels while leading people to construe their experiences more abstractly and less concretely. In this vein, time-outs, third-party mediators, and writing interventions may all prove useful to the extent that they fulfill these enabling conditions.