Have you ever gotten an email that insulted you and prompted you to react immediately? Then, maybe the next hour or day, you realized your interpretation was incorrect, your answer wasn’t appropriate and you ended up making matters worse?
We’re again at the center for emotions of the brain, the amygdala. However, this is not a situation threatening your life. You don’t have to react immediately – but sometimes it happens.
We deal with emotions since birth and learn to negotiate with our parents, peers, etc. Fortunately, we get increasingly better at it! But even as adults, some situations or conditions just lower our emotional threshold and send us into a rage. The frontal cortex that allows us to think things through isn’t used as it could.
I’m assuming most of us prefer not to overreact.
There are a few things that we could keep in mind when dealing with tricky situations that involve communicating with others:
- Take (and give) time for considered responses.
- Be clear and not vague or ambiguous.
- Be aware of your own fallibility. There are things we can’t know for sure, like what’s going on in the other person’s mind.
- Avoid provocation and remember the interlocutor’s self-respect.
Taking time is by far the most important as it facilitates all the others.
I find this makes a lot of sense in everyday life and is essential for decision-makers. In fact, I encountered this list when reading about the things that contributed to the start of World War I and helped to avert a war during the missile crisis of 1962. There were other factors as well, but it’s not surprising communication played a huge role.
Here are a few, very condensed examples of how some items listed above were employed to increase the conflict at the start of WW1. In 23 July 1914, as a response to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum (time pressure) against Serbia, giving them 48 hours to answer. Considering the situation, 48h is not much. Besides, the terms of the ultimatum were considered humiliating (ignoring interlocutor’s self-respect). Still, except for one, all conditions were accepted. Since in this case one of the parties was aiming for war, the lack of time and the provocation were intentional. However, Austria-Hungary expected Russia not to intervene quickly to help Serbia (lacking awareness of fallibility). They hoped for a smaller and quicker war than the one that ensued.
Why did I mention the amygdala in the beginning of this text? We can’t deny the power of emotions in communication. Emotions are important but should be complemented with reasoning. By engaging the frontal cortex we can better deal with them and the list above offers some suggestions of how to do this. This is true when deciding the future of our countries and when deciding how to answer a tricky message – of course, as long as it’s people doing these things.
| References |
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| Chapters 21-23, ‘Humanity’ from Jonathan Glover These contain the discussion of many factors related to WW1 and the Cuban missile crisis, including aspects related to communication. That’s were I found the items used in the list of suggestions above. |
| TED Talk ‘You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them’ from Lisa Feldman Barrett Emotions can be so overwhelming sometimes, it might seem difficult to pause before reacting to them. This talk is about how we can have more control over emotions than we think and suggests can change the way we engage with them. |
| Wikipedia entry about the ventromedial prefrontal cortex Mentions the connections of this area of the cortex to and from the amygdala and also its functions, one of them being regulation of emotion. |
Image credit: Pocket watch image by anncapictures from Pixabay
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