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Issue 1: Identifying Conditions That Affect How Hostile Emotions Are Expressed

Considerable research suggests that people follow the action tendency to attack when experiencing hostile emotions. Although con­tempt and disgust may be difficult to express constructively, other hostile emotions, such as anger and jealousy, can be expressed in a positive manner that focuses on sharing feel­ings and solving problems.

Gottman’s (1994) research shows that emotional flooding is one condition that prevents people from respond­ing to hostile emotions productively. EVT sug­gests that people are also unlikely to express hostile emotions in a constructive manner if they consider the behavior that prompted that emotion to be a negative violation of expectancies. However, EVT, along with the IM (Rusbult et al., 1994), specifies that people may resist the urge to retaliate when expe­riencing hostile emotions if the relationship is rewarding enough. The IM also suggests that people will be less quick to respond aggressively if they have invested a lot into a relationship or if they have poor quality alter­natives. The extent to which these relationship factors can prevent emotional flooding and curb relational responses is unknown. Thus, scholars could benefit from better understand­ing the associations between relationship char­acteristics and the experience and expression of hostile emotions during conflict.

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Source: Oetzel John, Ting-Toomey Stella. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. SAGE Publications,2013. — 912 p.. 2013

More on the topic Issue 1: Identifying Conditions That Affect How Hostile Emotions Are Expressed:

  1. Issue 1: Identifying Conditions That Affect How Hostile Emotions Are Expressed
  2. Oetzel John, Ting-Toomey Stella. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. SAGE Publications,2013. — 912 p., 2013
  3. Introduction: The Nature of Conflict and Conflict Resolution
  4. TYPES OF INJUSTICE
  5. References
  6. THEORY AND RESEARCH