The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  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 emotion-arousing 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, 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, or 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, feelings, 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 (e.g., 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 (e.g., 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 (i.e., 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 time-out 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.

  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 self-immersed 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 self-distanced 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.

  SELF-REGULATORY PLANS AND IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES

  Implementation strategies connect general goals (“Resolve conflict constructively”) to a specific implementation intention (“If she says I’m rude, I’ll ask her to cite specific examples; I won’t lose my temper and start calling her names”). Creating a specific contingency (IF_____) that becomes connected to a specific planned response (THEN_____) helps ensure implementation of the plan by tying a hot trigger event to the intended response rather than the habitual response. For instance, translating the goal of “health and physical fitness” into an intention to “exercise regularly” is not an effective plan of action because it is too broad. An effective plan of action specifies the how, when, and where rather than just the what of the action steps needed to accomplish the goal (Gollwitzer, 1996). A better plan for the person seeking a healthier lifestyle might be, “I’ll go to the park and jog two miles every weekday evening as soon as I get home from work.” This is a better plan because it specifies the exact action (jogging two miles), when and where it happens (every weekday in the park), and the situation that triggers the action (as soon as I get home from work). A similarly detailed plan of action can help ensure that specific conflict resolution strategies are initiated at the right time and place and with the appropriate people.

  MODELING, ROLE PLAY, OR REHEARSAL

  People do not learn new response patterns just through direct ex
perience. They can also learn adaptive responses to conflict from observing others. Aggressive children and adolescents, in particular, can profit immensely from training interventions that teach them nonviolent techniques for handling interpersonal conflicts. Observing skilled models deal effectively with difficult situations allows the observer to achieve greater freedom in coping with current and future problems of all sorts (Bandura, 1986).

  In modeling, appropriate and effective responses are repeatedly modeled by competent individuals in a variety of problem-provoking situations (Bandura, 1969, 1986). Generally the modeling begins with observation of effective behaviors in relatively easy situations and, when learners have mastered them, moves gradually to those that are increasingly difficult. In participant modeling, in addition to observing, learners also have guided opportunities to try the modeled behavior and receive the necessary guidance along with ample opportunity to practice the new behavior until they can respond to similar problem situations skillfully and generalization is achieved.

  Live or videotaped modeling demonstrations can be an excellent way to communicate appropriate behaviors in a variety of realistic situations and contexts. Voice-over narration can direct attention to key features and explicate the underlying action plan of which the model is merely an example. On an instructional video, voice-overs can be used to represent what people are thinking to themselves and the cognitive-affective strategies they are using to help manage themselves during the conflict and can point to nonobvious behaviors such as body language. Demonstration can be used to contrast good and poor performance and to show the positive outcomes associated with good performance and the potential negative consequences of poor performance. Demonstration can also be used to symbolically model internal processes of self-control by showing what people are thinking and feeling. By having people talk out loud and explain what they are thinking and feeling, one can use demonstration to model internal dynamics as well as observable behavior.

  CONCLUSION

  Intense conflicts, whether internal within the individual or external between individuals and groups, typically generate strong, “hot” emotional arousal that easily triggers automatic, virtually reflexive reactions, such as avoidance and flight or aggression and fight. Often these impulsive reactions are exactly the ones that lead to disadvantageous long-term consequences for all concerned. Shifting from hot, emotion-driven, impulsive reactions to cooler, more effective modes of cognitive problem solving is facilitated by a variety of cooling strategies, such as selective attention and reappraisal. A variety of techniques, including time-outs, reflection, exposure to effective models, planning or rehearsal, and role play, can help individuals readily use such strategies when they are most needed—and, ironically, most difficult to access spontaneously—in efforts at effective conflict resolution.

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