Emotional Terrorism: Breaking the Chains of a Toxic Relationship

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The results from Study 3 are consistent with those from Studies 1 and 2 (see the bottom-most panel). Learning how to properly identify characteristics of projector behavior, as well as recipient behavior can help to lessen this epidemic. Looking first at those who were assigned to the anger article and emotion-focused coping condition compared to those assigned to the control article and control coping conditions (top panel of figure 3), the difference in anger at T 1 is 0. Those in the emotion-focused condition experience a greater reduction in anger, resulting in opinions that are on par with those in the control/control condition.

after respondents receive the problem-focused coping condition (relative to the control coping condition). Hijackals LOVE to take advantage of someone who will fall all over themselves to keep the Hijackal happy.This creates a scale from -1 to 1, where positive values indicate a reduction in the emotion, negative values correspond with an increase in the emotion, and a score of 0 indicates no change in the emotion.

For Study 1, we ran an experiment on the 2017 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) with 1,000 adult Americans. We think this is often the case in the political arena, where representatives offer policy options, such as confronting our foreign enemies, which allows the public to rally behind these proposals and thereby lower their emotional distress; however, not so much that it then reduces the extremity of their opinions, at least in the case of conservatives in our study.As Doise (1986) put it, several levels of analysis are required to understand social objects, from intra-personal to ideological levels, and through both inter-personal and positional levels. This process could in turn be a threat to the outgroup identity, and even more if this group is a minority already with a bad stereotype. If you’re scared to do so, it may be best to have this conversation in the office of a professional—hopefully, a counselor rather than a lawyer or a police officer.

After reading the letter, respondents were asked whether they would like to send the letter to their senators. We build on this design in our final study by including a control coping condition to test the effectiveness of the coping strategies against a baseline, and also incorporate a measure to test the hypothesis related to policy attitude extremity. Our paper suggests that these types of responses are less effective in reducing anger among the public than emotion-focused strategies, and do not lead to a decrease in extreme opinions among conservatives.It posits that one part of people’s self “derives from their membership in social group (or groups)” (Tajfel, 1981). After an emotion is experienced, an individual’s motivation is to reduce their negative feeling by engaging in coping strategies.