The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  FROM HOT TO COOL: ENABLING WILLPOWER

  To understand the processes that enable willpower in executing one’s intentions, two closely interacting systems have been proposed: a “hot” system and a “cool” one (Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). The cool system is a “know” system: it is cognitive, complex, contemplative, slow, rational, strategic, integrated, coherent, and emotionally neutral—it is the basis of self-regulation and self-control. In this theory, it consists of a network of informational cool nodes that are elaborately interconnected to each other and generate rational, reflective, and strategic behavior. In contrast, the hot one is a “go” system: emotional, simple, reflexive, and fast. It consists of relatively few representations, or hot spots, that, when activated by trigger stimuli, elicit virtually reflexive avoidance and approach reactions. The hot system develops early in life and is dominant in the first few years. It is tuned biologically to be responsive to innate releasing stimuli, both negative and positive, that elicit automatic, aversive, fear-and-flight reactions, or appetitive and sexual approach reactions. Impulsive and reflexive, the hot system is the basis of emotionality, fears as well as passions; it undermines rational attempts at self-control.

  The hot-cool model assumes that cognition and affect operate in continuous interaction with one another. (For similar opponent process models, see Epstein, 1994; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, and Trope, 2002.) Specifically, hot spots and cool nodes are directly connected to one another and thus link the two systems (Metcalfe and Jacobs, 1996, 1998; Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). Hot spots can be evoked by activation of corresponding cool nodes; alternatively, hot representations can be cooled through intersystem connections to the corresponding cool nodes. Willpower becomes possible to the extent that the cooling strategies generated by the cognitive cool system circumvent hot system activation through such intersystem connections that link hot spots to cool nodes. Thus, consequential for self-control are the conditions under which hot spots do not have access to corresponding cool representations, because these conditions are the ones that undermine or prevent cool system regulation of hot impulses.

  Analysis of the interactions between hot and cool systems allows prediction and explanation of diverse findings on the nature of willpower from decades of research. Although the processes involved in these interactions are quite complex, the implications for conflict management are straightforward. Namely, the essential ingredient for effective self-regulation is to strategically cool the hot system and its impulsive reaction tendencies—reactions that are readily activated in conflict situations—and instead mobilize the cool system in pursuit of long-term goals.

  The balance between the hot and cool systems depends on several factors, the first of which is the developmental level of the individual. The hot system develops and dominates early in life, whereas the cool system develops later (by age four) and becomes increasingly dominant over the course of development. Consequently, early in development, the baby is primarily responsive to the pushes and pulls of hot stimuli in the external world as many of the hot spots do not have corresponding cool nodes that can regulate and inhibit hot system processing. These developmental differences are consistent with evidence on the differential rates of development of the relevant brain areas for these two systems. (For reviews, see Eisenberger, Smith, Sadovsky, and Spinrad, 2004; Rothbart, Ellis, and Posner, 2004.)

  Empirical evidence from the delay of gratification studies supports these expectations. For example, whereas delay of gratification is virtually impossible for children younger than four years of age (Mischel, 1974), by age twelve almost 60 percent of children in some studies were able to wait the duration of the period to receive the awaited reward (25 minutes maximum; Ayduk and others, 2000, study 2). As the cool system develops over time, however, it becomes increasingly possible for children to generate cooling strategies (such as self-distraction, inventing mental games to make the delay less aversive), to be less controlled by their temptations (Mischel and others, 1989).

  In the context of conflict resolution, the most important determinant of hot-system, cool-system balance is stress. At high levels, stress deactivates the cool system and creates hot-system dominance. At lower levels of stress, complex thinking, planning, and remembering are possible. When stress levels jump from low to very high, as in life-threatening emergency conditions (escape the approaching perpetrator or die, get the food or starve), responding tends to be reflexive and automatic—hardly the time for cognitive complexity and reflection. Under conditions in which an animal’s life is threatened, quick responses driven by innately determined stimuli may be essential. At the same time, such automatic reactions undo rational efforts at constructive conflict resolution for the types of dilemmas that typically characterize everyday human conflicts.

  The effects of chronic stress are evident even at a physical level. For example, exposure to prolonged stress has correlated with decreases in the volume of the hippocampus (Sapolsky, 1996), a brain structure that is basic for the functioning of the cool system. Other studies indicate that rats exposed to repeated stress demonstrate dendritic spine loss in medial prefrontal cortex (Brown, Henning, and Wellman, 2005; Radley and others, 2004; Radley, 2005)—a cellular feature of stress-related psychiatric disorders in which the prefrontal cortex is impaired—and dendritic spine growth in the amygdala (Mitra, Jadhav, McEwen, Vyas, and Chattarji, 2005; Vyas, Bernal, and Chattarji, 2003)—a neuronal event that is thought to facilitate increased emotionality. In humans, severe and chronic stress (as in war and terror conditions) may result in dominant activation of the hot system as opposed to the cool system in ways that become relatively stable and difficult to reverse. In short, conflict and stress are intimately linked and feed each other so as to easily and automatically undermine rational problem solving and escalate irrational and self-defeating hot behavior. In this cycle, stress increases the potential for conflict, which in turn escalates the level of stress, producing a pernicious cascade of impulsive hot-system responses and consequences that further undermine any chance for rational and effective conflict resolution. Fortunately, diverse strands of research from several fields converge that speak directly to this dilemma and point to new directions—or at least metaphors—for dealing constructively with conflict.

  Consider again the marshmallow test. For this situation, delay of gratification and frustration tolerance are enhanced if the person can transform the aversive waiting period into a pleasant, nonwaiting situation. There are two primary ways that this can be done. One way is by diverting attention and thoughts away from the frustrative components of delay of gratification and thinking instead about other, pleasant things. Such distractions can be achieved by engaging in activities, overtly or mentally, during the delay period that help to suppress or decrease the aversiveness of waiting for the desired outcome, while retaining the goal and continuing to persist for it. Distraction tactics such as these often are seen in everyday conflict situations in the form of “time-outs,” which allow people to take a break from building disputes to focus attention elsewhere in order to calm down, regain composure, and have a fresh look.

  Second, the aversiveness of the delay period also can be neutralized by changing the way people mentally represent the outcomes they are waiting or working for. For example, in a number of studies, Mischel and colleagues have shown that cueing children to think about the rewards in terms of their concrete, motivating, “hot” features (i.e., you can think about how gooey and yummy marshmallows taste) undermines children’s ability to delay gratification. In contrast, a focus on the more abstract, informational, “cool” features of desired treats (that is, you can think about how round and puffy marshmallows are, like cotton balls or clouds) has the opposite effect, functioning to enhance delay ability. (For review, see Mischel and others, 1989.) In short, voluntary delay of reward can be aided by activities that serve as distracters from the reward and thus from the aversiveness of wanting it but not having it, or by mentally re-representing
the reward more abstractly and less concretely. Through such distraction and mental re-representation, it is possible to convert the frustrating delay-of-reward situation into a psychologically less aversive condition. Thus, rather than trying to maintain an aversive activity through an act of will or focused attention, effective self-control is helped by transforming the difficult into the easy, the aversive into the pleasant, and the boring into the interesting, while still maintaining the task-required activity on which the ultimate reward depends.

  Doing this effectively when the task is complex may require extensive rehearsal and planning for implementing the necessary action when it is needed (Gollwitzer, 1996; Mischel and Patterson, 1976). In effective delay of gratification, the child tunes out the hot properties of the reward stimulus while strategically cooling through self-distraction to sustain waiting behavior. Similarly, distracting and relaxation-induced activity, such as listening to music, reduces anxiety in the face of uncontrollable shocks and helps people cope with chronic pain (such as from rheumatoid arthritis and even with severe life crises). Cooling strategies generally can help one transform potentially stressful situations to make them less aversive. For example, if surgical patients are encouraged to reconstrue their hospital stay as a vacation from the stresses of daily life, they show better postoperative adjustment, just as chronically ill patients who reinterpret their conditions positively also show better adjustment.

  When considering how people can be helped to self-regulate adaptively, there is an important caveat: in the real world, situations that require individuals to exert self-control often involve both strategic cooling processes that enable people to remain calm and reflective in the face of temptation, as well as strategic heating processes to maintain commitment to pursuing the goals rather than quitting. For example, Peake, Hebl, and Mischel (2002) investigated second-by-second attention deployment during efforts at sustained delay of gratification. Self-regulation depended not just on cooling strategies, but on flexible attention deployment as well—delay in working situations was facilitated most when attention was intermittently shifted to the rewards, as if the children tried to enhance their motivation to remain calm by reminding themselves about the rewards, but then quickly shifted away to prevent excessive arousal (Peake and others, 2002). Such flexibility in attention deployment is consistent with the idea that it is the balanced interactions between the hot and cool systems that sustain delay of gratification, as they exert their motivating and cooling effects in tandem. (See also Mischel and others, 1989.)

  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 1 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 cool-system 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 that people fail to self-regulate during conflict (for review, see Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996; Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice, 1993), among them ambivalence or lack of firm resolve (i.e., 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 self-regulation 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 tend 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 commonsense 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 (e.g., 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 other 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 use other strategies, such as self-distraction and self-soothing, 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.