Emotion as a Motivator/Demotivator for Conflict Resolution

Video Transcription

Hi, I'm Julie Tietz. And welcome to Conflict Resolution-- putting the pieces together. Today, our topic for discussion is emotion as a motivator or demotivator for conflict resolution. So let's get started off with our key terms. Pleasure or pain motivation-- the most basic way of describing human motivation, a tendency to seek to obtain things which give pleasure and avoid things which cause pain.

So when we're talking about pleasure versus pain, these are our basic motivations in our lives. It's pretty simple to understand. Who doesn't like to have pleasure in their lives? I certainly like to have pleasure in my life. And the less pain, the better I'm in. And so we are motivated by seeking pleasure and reducing pain.

So incorporating pleasure and pain with our needs, when we are experiencing pleasure emotions, that typically means our needs are met versus pain, when we're experiencing painful emotions, our needs typically are being unmet. And so we seek out these specific emotions as pleasurable and painful. And we experience them as such.

So let's use some examples of pleasurable emotions-- excitement, proud, satisfaction. These are all emotions that we typically experience or can experience when our needs are met. Painful emotions could include sadness, worries, or fear even.

So these are all emotions that we could experience when our needs are unmet. And I'm sure you can think of plenty of other pleasure emotions and pain emotions that we all experience when it comes to having our needs satisfied.

In a conflict resolution process, we want to motivate the parties to go through the process through experiencing pleasurable emotions. And some of the things that they could experience through the process could include such as being heard, telling your side of the story. These both make people feel like they're being listened to.

And this process can offer a resolution to the conflict. So we can diminish our fear, our sadness, our worries that all come along with those painful emotions and then experience the more pleasurable emotions that come along with having the conflict over. And we also can see stronger relationships in this process in building better communication and possibly friendships after the conflict is resolved.

So let's go over our key points now on emotion as motivator or demotivator for conflict resolution. As humans, we are motivated by pleasure and pain. And when our needs are met, we experience those pleasure emotions, such as happiness and satisfaction, versus our unmet needs where we experience painful emotions, such as fear and doubt and worry.

But when we motivate parties to a resolution process, we do this through the pleasure emotions to highlight how this can have their needs met through having a conflict resolution process and through resolving their conflict. Thank you for taking the time out to view this tutorial. I hope you've learned something. And I can't wait to catch you again next time.