The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EMOTION AND CONFLICT Why It Is Important to Understand How Emotions Affect Conflict and How Conflict Affects Emotions

  Evelin G. Lindner

  How do emotion and conflict interact? This chapter begins with two introductory examples—one international and one personal.

  Adolf Hitler was obsessed with bemoaning the weakness of Germany already during World War I. But he was a loner without any influence. It was only later that his obsessions began to resonate with the feelings of other people, particularly with die kleinen Leute, as they were called in Germany, or “the little people,” “the powerless.” He invited everybody to join in a grand narrative of national humiliation and invest their personal grievances, including those they suffered due to general political and economic misery. “The little people” had occupied a distinctly subordinated position in Germany’s social hierarchy prior to Hitler’s rise. Nobody had ever deemed them worthy of particular attention. They greeted Hitler as a savior; his invitation provided them with an unprecedented sense of importance.

  Hitler was an expert on feelings. He wrote: “The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially” (Hitler, 1925–1926, p. 167).

  Many Germans put such faith in Hitler that they followed him even when it became obvious that the situation was doomed. It required total defeat for many of his “lovers” to painfully realize that their loyalty had been fatally misplaced. Their loyalty not only led to million-fold homicide, it was even suicidal. Their own country, Germany, was bombed to ashes. Only Hitler himself was satisfied, as he believed in “das Recht des Stärkeren” (“might is right”). Hitler said on November 27, 1941, to the Danish foreign minister, Erik Scavenius, and the Croat foreign minister, Mladen Lorkowitsch: “I am also here ice cold. If the German people are no longer strong enough and ready to sacrifice their own blood for their existence, then they must disappear and be destroyed by another, stronger power. . . . I will not shed a tear for the German people” (Haffner, 1978, p. 139).

  Now to a personal example. Imagine you are a social worker with a client named Eve. She comes to you because she is depressed. She is severely and regularly beaten by her husband, Adam. Neighbors describe scenes of shouting and crying, and the bruise marks on Eve’s body are only too obvious. You implore Eve to leave her unsafe home and seek refuge in sheltered housing, at least at times of crisis. In your mind, she is a victim and her husband is a perpetrator. You explain to Eve that “domestic chastisement” has long been outlawed. You suggest that Adam utterly humiliates her and that she ought to develop a “healthy” anger as a first step toward collecting sufficient strength to change her life. To you this situation represents a destructive conflict loaded with hot and violent emotions and you wish to contribute to its constructive resolution.

  Eve stubbornly undermines your efforts: “Beating me is my husband’s way of loving me! I am not a victim. I bring his anger on myself when I fail to respect his authority! He saved me from a cruel father! My father never spoke of love and care—Adam does!” Adam also adamantly refuses to be labeled a “perpetrator.” He accuses you of viciously disturbing the peace of his home, claiming that you violate his male honor.

  From Eve’s and Adam’s perspective, there is no destructive conflict, no suffering victim, and no violent perpetrator. It is you, the social worker, the human rights defender, the therapist, an uninvited third party, who creates conflict.

  As we see, the definition of love and benevolence is crucial here. You define love as the meeting of equal hearts and minds in mutual caring, a definition embedded in the human rights ideal of equal dignity for all. Eve and her husband, however, connect love with female subservience. They are right in that you introduce conflict by drawing their attention to a new definition of love.

  In both cases, that of Eve and that of the “little people” of Germany, their loyalty was intensified by their dominators’ giving them the feeling of being loved as human beings endowed with feelings, rather than simply dominated like chattel. Martin Buber speaks about I-Thou relationships, in contrast to I-It relationships. People hunger to be approached as human beings and not as things. The promise of dignity, even if undelivered, is strong enough to elicit considerable loyalty—and it can be tragically instrumentalized and abused.

  We can easily find more examples. Typically neither the supposed “perpetrators” nor their co-opted “victims” initially accept human rights framings of equal dignity. The South African elites, for example, were defensive about apartheid—they felt it was nature’s order itself that entitled them to superiority. Many “victims” also internalized this worldview. The more a ranking order was one of benevolent patronage rather than malevolent oppression—or at least convincingly portrayed as such—the more outcomes were condoned that were other- and even self-destructive.

  Practices such as “honor killings” and female genital cutting have recently moved from the category of “cultural practices” to “harmful traditional practices.” Emotion researchers will want to resist the introduction of new “nonlethal weapons” that target emotions and thoughts. The Center for Cognitive Liberties affirms “the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought” (www.cognitiveliberty.org).

  In this conundrum, in which emotion and conflict are entangled in int
ricate ways, questions arise. When and in what ways are emotions (feelings of suffering, pain and rage, or love and caring) part of a “conflict” that calls for our attention? And when are they not? Who decides? If perpetrator and victim agree that there is peace, who, as a third party, has the right to call it conflict? And what about “waging good conflict”?

  What we learn is that emotion and conflict are not unfolding in a vacuum. They are embedded into larger historical and cultural contexts. We live in transitional times where growing global interdependence is connected with the human rights ideal of equal dignity for all. Emotions and conflicts and their consequences—how we live them, how we define them—are part of this transition. They too change as the world transforms.

  THE NATURE OF EMOTIONS

  What are emotions? Are emotions cultural or biological, or both? Are they nothing more than constructs of folk knowledge? Or are they merely bodily responses, dictated by hormones, skin conductance levels, and cerebral blood flows? Are there basic emotions? Affects? Feelings? Thoughts? Why do we have them? What functions do they serve? What about the so-called social emotions? What about the meta-emotions of how people feel about feelings? Are there universal emotions across cultures? Are emotions rational? Controllable? To which actions do emotions lead? Is there an automatic link between emotion and action?

  Interestingly, William James (1842–1910), one of the fathers of the field of psychology as we know it today in the academic context, gave significant attention to research on human emotion, while his immediate successors did so much less. Only a few visionary scholars, such as Silvan Tomkins, Magda Arnold, Paul Ekman, Carroll Izard, Klaus Scherer, and Nico Frijda, continued studying emotion. For a while, behaviorism and cognitivism were “sexier” than looking at emotions—until behaviorism turned out to be too narrow, as did cognitivism.

  Today we know that thought, behavior, and feeling are closely connected. And this insight is as important for the field of conflict studies as for psychology. Political scientist Robert Jervis (2006) underscores how “over the past decade or so, psychologists and political psychologists have come to see . . . that a sharp separation between cognition and affect is impossible and that a person who embodied pure rationality, undisturbed by emotion, would be a monster if she were not an impossibility” (p. 643).

  Interest in learning about emotions is now exploding and already rapidly changing, fueled (some would say, overfueled) and “legitimized,” not least, by new technologies. Research on mirror neurons, for instance, underpins the recent emphasis on emotion, making headlines in mainstream publications such as the New York Times: “Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, disgust and lust are based on a uniquely human mirror neuron system found in a part of the brain called the insula” (“Cells That Read Minds,” 2006).

  Imaging techniques are being employed to examine the function and structure of the neural circuits that support human emotion processing and emotion regulation. The Program for Imaging and Cognitive Sciences at Columbia University in New York City is but one example of similar projects emerging in many places. What is being researched is crucially important also for conflict studies: the neurocircuitry of emotional systems (amygdala and basal ganglia) and control and regulatory systems (cingulate and prefrontal cortex).

  Until only a few years ago, researchers were intent on constructing classifications of fundamental basic emotions. Andrew Ortony and Terence Turner (1990) give a tabular overview of some of the classification systems.

  Today the new cohort of researchers no longer endorses a single perspective on emotion. They prefer multilayered approaches that conceptualize elaborated emotions as comprehensive packages of meanings, behaviors, social practices, and norms that crystallize around primordial emotions. Jan Smedslund (1997) describes the psychologic inherent in our dealings with emotions. James Averill (1997) discusses how emotional experiences are “scripted.” The application of such scripts varies according to cultural and historic influences. A rich overview of the new approaches to emotion research is to be found, among many others, in David Yun Dai and Robert Sternberg (2004), Joseph Forgas (2001), and Tracy Mayne and George Bonanno (2001). Among the journals that serve as platforms for emotion research are Emotion, Emotion Review, Emotion, Space and Society, International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, Consciousness and Emotion, Motivation and Emotion, Cognition and Emotion, Research on Emotion in Organizations, and Frontiers in Emotion Science.

  Another major shift in the field of psychology is toward a more relational view, away from regarding the individual as the main unit of analysis (Jordan and Hartling, 2002). “Social connectedness is one of the most powerful determinants of our wellbeing” (Putnam, 2000, p. 326) and “happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one’s social connections” (p. 332). Mutually empathic and empowering relationships are key to resilience in the face of hardships and stress (Hartling, 2003). Individualistic “separate-self” models of psychological development have endured in Western psychology perhaps not least because these models serve a consumer economy that thrives on a myth of self-sufficiency (Cushman, 1996).

  Another new trend is the “humbling of Western psychology.” Western psychology is merely one psychology among others, and indigenous psychologies of emotion are gaining visibility now. (See, for instance, Averill and Sundararajan, 2006; Sibia and Misra, 2011; Dalal and Misra, 2012.)

  All new approaches invalidate the old nature-versus-nurture debate. Emotions are both hardwired and malleable, and adaptive to social and cultural influences. Basic affects are the bedrock on which elaborated emotions build. Our primordial emotions are universal biologically based response systems that have enabled humans to meet the problems of physical survival, reproduction, and group governance. Culture, however, has loosened the link between those primordial emotions and their functions. New solutions to old problems have emerged, as have new uses for old emotions.

  The historical evolution of the brain and emotions is mirrored in each human being’s individual development. Ontogeny (development of an individual organism) often recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a particular species). Newborns process basic affects in lower brain structures. Emotions, which are more recent in human evolution, become possible only when certain cognitive milestones have been reached in the life of a child. In the second half of the second year of life, the cognitive capacity of objective self-awareness emerges, with accompanying emotions such as embarrassment, empathy, and envy. Between two and three years of age, the complex ability to evaluate one’s behavior according to an external or internal standard emerges. Self-conscious evaluative emotions such as pride, shame, and guilt are now possible. Schemas for emotions evolve to organize what we believe and how we react to emotions. Finally, cognition and affect are forcefully intertwined in cultural symbol and knowledge systems such as religions.

  The most immediate function of the emotional apparatus is to warn us. Fear alerts us to potential danger or to potential benefit (LeDoux, 2002). We hear a noise. Is it a thief—or just our favorite cat? The first brain structure to react is the amygdala, an almond-shaped neurological structure in the lower cortical brain. This structure identifies shapes, sounds, and other perceptual characteristics, sorting for threats and, very quickly and automatically, responding with avoidance if necessary. It acts as a preattentive analyzer of our environment and works without our conscious control, triggering fast and automatic changes in tone and heart rate. Fear is a primary reaction that is processed via adrenergic neurons (as opposed to dopaminergic neurons). Is it a thief? We jump up from our chair, breathe heavily, and feel frightened. This system developed early in human evolution and dominates our first years as children. In adults, stress brings it to the fore again, often in unfortunate ways.

  Let’s assume the noise proves to emanate from our favorite cat. The amygdala can relax, passing the data on to the basal ganglia to encode and store, awash in positive-valence dopaminergic neurons. We open
our arms to our purring pet. This simple daily stimulus response is aided by information from two internal “library” structures (the left prefrontal cortex and a posterior area) from which our brain draws stored abstract semantic and associative knowledge. All of this is automatic. We are not in control. Indeed, research shows that our brain begins to unconsciously prepare our decisions several seconds before they reach our awareness. (The potential implications of this research for free will, highly relevant for conflict studies, have been discussed at great length in the literature; see, for instance, Roskies, 2010.)

  Our brain “wakes up” to controlled emotion processing when a higher brain structure, the anterior cingulate (ACC), signals discrepancy, uncertainty, errors, conflicts, pain, or violations of expectations. The ACC tells us when something is wrong, when our automatic responses do not work and we need to do something different. At that point, two high cortical structures, the ventromedial frontal cortex (VMFC) and orbital frontal cortex, weigh our current goals and the affective value of the situation we face. We need these higher cortical structures particularly in conflict situations, because they empower us to regulate and control our emotional responses. Here we learn and adapt, and generate self-consciousness, abstraction, and imagination. The VMFC is crucial for appropriate judgments of right and wrong; damage to it increases narrow, utilitarian moral judgments. Research on these processes clearly is highly relevant for conflict studies. (“Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections” is the title of a relevant article by Damásio, 2007.)

  To come back to Eve facing Adam—or to global neighbors negotiating climate change or nuclear disarmament—all participants’ brains loop through at least six brain structures that deal with emotion, from lower to higher brain structures, from evolutionarily older to more recent components, from stored memories of how we reacted as children to new modes of responses that are open to us as adults. There are several distinctions and dualities. Feelings can be hot or cold, they can have positive or negative valence, and they can be automatic or controlled. Furthermore, there is the doer-watcher duality. The duality of attention and processing is based on the fact that we can perform a task and at the same time watch ourselves performing this task. Emotions can interfere in this duality and disturb task focus and performance.