Neuroscience Offers Insights
La Vista – Humans are emotional beings, not rational ones.
The vast majority of human reactions are emotional, and the majority of our brain mass is dedicated to emotional responses, which offer a quick, efficient way to make decisions.
Most problems can’t be solved by rationality, so mediators and peace makers must engage with clients’ emotions first before attempting a more rational approach to resolving conflict.
That’s a key insight Douglas E. Noll asked an audience to consider last Wednesday during a session at the Nebraska State Bar Association Annual Meeting at the La Vista Embassy Suites.
“This is what neuroscience is teaching us,” Noll said.
Noll spent 22 years practicing law as a business and commercial trial lawyer. He has worked with a colleague since 2010 on Prison of Peace, which helps inmates develop peacemaking skills to reduce violence in their community. Noll now is a senior consultant with Mobius Executive Leadership and maintains a high-level mediation and arbitration practice.
During a mediation, most parties experience intense emotions – so intense that it becomes hard for them to express. Noll encouraged mediators to use a strategy called affect labeling to explain how the parties are feeling so they can recognize it for themselves.
Other techniques can result in emotional invalidation and create barriers to progress, instead of seeking to acknowledge and accept how the person is feeling.
Noll said that someone who is overwhelmed by emotion and unable to express them is experiencing a phenomena known as alexithymia. In that situation, the prefrontal cortex of the person’s brain is being bypassed, and they are physiologically incapable of processing their emotions and regulating how they are feeling.
“In order to deescalate somebody, we have to reduce their alexithemic tendencies,” he said.
Affect labeling requires the mediator to first ignore the words being said by the upset person – if only to avoid trigging themselves.
The mediator then guesses at the emotion being felt by the other person, which is usually easy, and reflects that emotion back using a “you” statement. For example, the mediator might tell a client, “You are angry. You feel disrespected and unsupported.”
The goal is for the other person to realize how they are feeling, so they can get past feeling overwhelmed by emotion and begin to engage more dispassionately.
“You are literally lending your prefrontal cortex to the other person,” Noll said.
For more information on Noll and his affect labeling strategy, visit dougnoll.com or check out his 2017 book “De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less.”
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