Negotiating While Hopping Mad: Managing Emotions in Negotiations
Whatever spurs on intense moments for you, parenting seems to come part and parcel with both frustrations and strong positive emotions. In relationships so filled with dramatic ups and downs, it’s not unusual for negotiations to veer away from the calm and logical interactions that we might wish for. To negotiate well, we first need to make sure we can understand and manage the emotional landscape for ourselves and our kids.
Emotions are part of being human. They signal what’s important to us, and thus it isn’t surprising that life at home triggers intense feelings. We care about the people, we care about the issues that need negotiating, and we’re in a setting where we tend to feel more comfortable letting our emotions show. Emotions are always present, but it’s only when they cross the tipping point that they become tricky and can overwhelm a situation. Even so, the goal is not to squash them entirely. They let us express and receive very valuable information—positive emotions can unlock information sharing, better decision making, and more creativity,1 while negative emotions (as long as they stay low in intensity) can signal the magnitude of issues and help organize and prioritize them.2 But emotions are dynamic and can escalate fast, and things can go from reasonable to disastrous in mere minutes.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO THINK STRAIGHT WHEN MAD, SAD, OR GLAD?
American short story writer Ambrose Bierce once said, “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” Another famous quote (from an unknown source) cautions you to “Be careful with your words. Once they are said, they can only be forgiven and not forgotten.” A third quote, “Speak in haste, repent at leisure” (a popular adaptation of the original aphorism “marry in haste, repent at leisure”) offers a similar lesson. The fact that there are so many quotes saying the same thing reflects the reality of this problem. When emotions take over, we find ourselves doing and saying things we wouldn’t consider at other times, and that might cause damage.
Scientifically, we know that emotional intensity changes the brain in many ways, though the actual processes are hard to pin down.3 There are three theories as to why emotions can cloud our thinking, each with evidence to support them.
•Intense experiences dominate our minds: Having an intense emotional experience may take up so much energy in one region of the brain that there isn’t enough left over for other regions that do things like regulate our attention or process information.
•Intense experiences restrict brain function: Strong negative emotions may actually reduce the blood flow to the brain entirely, making it harder for any of the parts of the brain to function at all.
•Intense experiences preoccupy us: Being in a situation of intense emotion may serve to reorganize our priorities. We may get so consumed with coping with this new situation (appraising it and our own and others’ behaviors in it, and sorting out who’s at fault for what’s happening) that we just don’t care about anything else. In this theory, it’s not that we don’t have the capacity to think about other things, but that we’ve deemed them as relatively unimportant at this moment. We’re so focused on the most intense element of our incoming environment that we all but totally ignore everything else, let alone think clearly about it.
No matter what’s causing it, the effects are the same. Strong emotions mean that we’re no longer able to carefully and rationally consider the content of a discussion or request.
Key Point: It’s almost never better to have a loud and emotionally forceful conversation rather than a calm and reasonable one.
When a child, whether toddler or teen, is ramping up the emotional intensity of a situation and trying to bait you into a reaction, it’s challenging to maintain your composure. Of course, not everyone is the same when it comes to the degree of emotion that they tend to express. Some people naturally have a very calm and even reaction to emotional situations, while others are much more expressive and potentially volatile.
In a survey of parents, when asked “what percent of your negotiations with your children happen in a calm voice versus a raised voice?” the vast majority of people gave an extreme answer. That is, virtually nobody said “50–50” but instead, most said something more like “80–20,” such as the person who responded with “80% in a calm manner, and 20% run for your life!” However, which was the 80% and which was the 20% was not always the same. One batch of parents said that 80% of the time they were calm (or pretending to be calm), while another batch said that 80% of the time they were loud and agitated. The danger of being in the “80% loud” group is that, just like overusing the “because I said so” response, the effect of raising your voice (to get your child’s attention and to make it clear that this topic is important) loses its meaning if it becomes the standard tone for your interactions. They will start to tune you out, just as you might tune out a child who is always whining. The danger in being in the “mostly calm” group is that some of your important messages might get downplayed, as well as giving your kids the (false) assumption that they can expect the world at large to stay calm and measured in response to their behaviors.
Stories from Home: I sometimes think it’s good for the kids to see me get mad. I even like to tell them the quote about how “if you mess with the bull, you get the horns.” This doesn’t hold if I’m out-of-control furious, but I think the goal of always being calm and measured with your kids is too far the other way!
Finally, it’s worth noting the inverse tactic, which involves nothing more than remaining silent. Few have either the insight or the patience to spontaneously pull this off, but not responding at all can truly make the other side second guess their approach.
Stories from Home: My son makes good use of silence. He can sit there, listening to me, without saying a word. After I finish my statements, he will pause for a long time, during which I’m generally nervous and start to think about my own words: “Am I being too harsh with him? Did I hurt his feelings?” But since he does this a lot, I’m learning how to not let it rattle me.
Key Point: Both raised voices and silence can have their place, and serve to get the attention of other people.
CATCH IT, SHARE IT, AND WEIGH IT: CONTAGION, CONGRUENCE, AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Emotional Contagion
Just like germs, emotions and moods are highly contagious. How we feel can be strongly influenced by the emotions coming at us from anyone nearby.4 This response is so robust that it seems to be a hard-wired part of human interaction that might be based on an automatic process of mimicry, since even infants tend to copy the facial expressions and tone of voice of the people around them. But with emotions, instead of a pure mirror-and-match effect (where you would find yourself feeling the exact same thing as someone else), the response can be thought of as more of a bleeding and blending of emotions. For example, seeing someone else be truly angry might make you mad as well, or might inspire fear instead. It’s the overall negative vibe that gets caught. Both positive and negative moods seem to be equally contagious, and one person’s mood can influence an entire group of other people.5
Beyond the minute-to-minute emotions that can affect us, there’s also a more stable emotional “culture” that can become established in certain settings, which is clear to everyone even if it’s not discussed.6 Did you ever have a job where the entire place was fun and people were in a good mood and helped each other out? Or one that felt toxic and fearful? Not surprisingly, in cultures driven by anger, employees can end up finding it easier to express anger than any other emotion. This is emotional contagion at work and usually starts with the leadership. When leaders express emotion, it has a tremendous trickle-down effect on the emotions of others around them. Your family is not unlike an organization in this way. It has its own emotional culture, and the emotions of any one person (especially the parents) can set the tone for how the rest of the family feels and acts. What you do and how you feel matters.
Stories from Home: I came home all stressed out from work one day, and within an hour, the kids were snapping at each other and at me even though they started out fine. I didn’t mean to, but I think I ruined everyone else’s night.
Key Point: Don’t underestimate the power of your own mood on those around you. Pay attention to how you feel.
Moods can be shared from Person A to Person B, but what if A is already in a good mood and B is already in a bad one? Does the good mood or the bad one win? Or do both people just keep their original mood? This is the question of congruence, or alignment between moods. We intuitively understand that trying to have a conversation with someone in a vastly different mood from our own can be a frustrating experience. One study aimed to pin this down by having pairs of people in different moods participate in a task where information sharing and problem solving were required (which is not unlike a negotiation). Even though people in a good mood are known to be more creative and more willing to share information, it became apparent that having a mood-match (two good mood people or even two bad mood people) was necessary to do well on the task, because the comfort associated with interacting with someone else in the same mood as yourself is so strong.7 The bad mood pairs weren’t great, but they were better than the mixed-mood pairs.
Key Point: Mismatched moods can be as problematic (or more) than bad moods. If you feel utterly out of sync, emotionally, with anyone in a conversation or negotiation, it should be a red flag for you and a sign that postponing the conversation is probably the best option.
Snap Judgments
You know the phrase “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”? This applies to emotions as well because what happens first in terms of emotional expression can set an irreversible course for the rest of the interaction. In a fascinating set of studies on what’s called thin slices, researchers have shown that observing others in even very small snippets of time can have a profound effect on what we think of them, the situation, and the decisions that get made, especially based on the emotional tone that we witness in those moments.8 This means that it doesn’t take very much for us to react, emotionally, to what we see other people do.
In negotiations, the intensity of your voice has been shown to inspire these kinds of snap judgments. One study of vocal signaling showed that even in just the first five minutes, more intense speech was related to a decrease in the amount earned in the negotiated deal.9 This was not based on the words chosen or offers made, but was purely the result of the reaction people had to the first moments of speech. In other words, coming on too strong or with too much intensity in the early stages of the negotiation can be problematic and limiting for yourself.
We also tend to remember both the moment of greatest emotional intensity and the way things happen at the very end more so than all the rest of our time spent with someone. In what’s called the peak-end effect,10 it seems we aren’t nearly as sensitive to the overall duration of an emotion, or to any sense of the average tone used throughout a conversation, but instead are strongly influenced by single intense moments. This means that even if overall you’ve handled yourself (and your anger or frustration) well, really losing it even for just a second could become the most important moment, and probably the only one that gets remembered.
Key Point: Even a brief expression of emotion gives a lasting impression and can set the tone for an entire interaction.
THE EMOTIONAL YOU VERSUS THE RATIONAL YOU: FIGHT OF THE CENTURY!
Imagine an elephant—eleven feet tall and 12,000 pounds. Now imagine a human rider, even a relatively big one—perhaps six feet tall and 200 pounds. The elephant represents your emotions and the rider represents your rational side.11 It’s a bit ridiculous to believe that the rider can fully control and direct the elephant; the elephant is 600 times heavier than the rider. Yet, we do expect that logic and rationality can prevail in the face of large emotions if we just “get ahold of ourselves” or say exactly the right thing to our kids who are in the middle of a bad moment. When that fails, we sometimes swing to other extremes: either total submission to the elephant’s whims, or trying to make the elephant disappear. None of these is very productive. We need a new choice instead, which starts with an analysis of what the elephant wants, what the rider wants, and how both can work together.
The elephant metaphor reminds us that to negotiate effectively you need to attend to your emotional state both before and during the conversation. Doing so effectively includes considering your own state of mind, having an understanding of what set you off, and making decisions about what needs to be done to defuse the situation and keep yourself on track, which can be assessed through the following questions.12
How Do You Feel Right Now?
“Physician, heal thyself.” This ancient proverb applied here means that you won’t be much use to anyone else if you’re being swallowed by your own emotions before engaging with others. Being mindful of your own emotional state is the first step in being able to use your emotions effectively, rather than let them become the “elephant in the room.” Emotions have a profound impact on how we assess a situation, the energy we can bring to that situation, and ultimately how we engage in it. A quick check-in with yourself might include considering: What’s the main thing you’re feeling right now? How are you expressing it? If you saw someone else expressing the same emotion in exactly the same way, what would you think of it—does it seem reasonable or might you suggest doing something differently?
Stories from Home: Many years ago, there was a day when my daughter was having a meltdown at the airport. I was so embarrassed by it and ended up furious and shouting in her little face as people walked by. I knew even as I was doing it that if I saw anyone else acting this exact same way, I would judge them harshly. I even mentally asked forgiveness from other people I had judged in the past for being so angry with their kids in public! But thinking about it in terms of how it looks to an outsider helped me realize that I didn’t want to do that again.
What’s the Trigger?
Identifying the drivers of your emotions can help loosen their grip on you. Backtrack and pinpoint what it is that set you off in the first place. Are the previous events in your day having a big impact on how you feel right now? Or is there a particular pattern that happens that sets you off?
Stories from Home: It took me a long time to realize that having my kids whine over and over and over about something after I’ve both answered the question and asked them to stop doing it is one of the things that eventually leads me to crack. The solution for me was to see it coming sooner, and either change the subject or leave the room.
Your kids’ moods can also affect you, so trying to trace their moods backward can also help your understanding of what’s going on. In addition to the more typical “tired, hungry, or stressed” problems, sometimes a child can be upset as a response to not achieving a goal.13 Imagine a child being disappointed, or even getting angry, over not being able to wear pajamas to a restaurant. The reaction is about the missed goal (to wear their favorite PJs), and is not necessarily directed at you. Recognizing that the goal is what’s driving the behavior can help you to maintain perspective on what’s happening and how to move forward without getting dragged down by the emotions being expressed.
Will Your Mood Get in the Way of What Needs to Be Done?
Strong emotions require a lot of energy, leaving you less able to handle situations the way you would want to. If you walk in the door frustrated, you may end up overwhelmed and snapping at your kids if they jump on you too fast with their own requests. Though it’s less commonly problematic, even being very excited may be too all-encompassing to give your child’s requests a reasonable response. The overall question is whether you can interact in a reasonable and productive way, or if your emotional state (or theirs) requires some attention of its own first.
Stories from Home: My daughter came home from school one day all upset about something that had happened with her friends. I should have realized that it wasn’t the time to talk to her about going to visit her cousins (whom she doesn’t really like), but I didn’t think about it in time. It was a disaster!
How Can You Defuse These Emotions?
Imagine you just had a contentious phone call with a colleague. If you get stuck in the type of thoughts like, “I can’t believe he would ask me to do that when I’ve done so much of this work already … It’s completely selfish of him,” you would probably incite your anger to higher levels. Instead, if you thought, “I can see that he’s really overwhelmed and I know that he’s been dealing with caring for a sick parent these days,” it would likely change your emotional reaction to the whole event. Self-righteousness makes us so much angrier than we otherwise might have been, while trying to understand where the other person is coming from can lead to a release of these negative feelings.
If you can’t find a good way to get perspective on a specific incident, you can also try widening the lens to include more global positive thoughts about the person. A frustrated parent might spot a child’s art project on the table, or see that all their homework has been completed, or notice the expression on the child’s face and remember that all of childhood is fleeting. Tuning into these kinds of things can help reshape how the whole situation is viewed, and the emotions that go along with it.
Stories from Home: When our kids were younger, my sister-in-law always used to say things like, “they’ve only been on this earth for five years” when they would misbehave. It was a really perspective-changing idea for me. It didn’t mean that we should allow them to act badly and explain it away by saying they’re too young to know better, but it did remind me that they didn’t have it in them to hold it together sometimes. Straight through teenage years, I found myself remembering her idea and realizing that our kids can’t always do better without our help. It made me less mad and more thoughtful about responding to their meltdowns.
Nobody Likes Being Told to Calm Down, But How Can You Physiologically Calm Down?
Emotions don’t just come out in words. Facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language send immediate signals about what’s happening internally. Even if you’ve already lost it and everyone knows you’re mad or frustrated, you can still choose how your emotion is expressed going forward.14 You can make a conscious decision to alter your facial expression, your body posture, your pace walking into a room, or even your breathing to decrease, magnify, or change what you feel. Focusing on something physical, like taking off your shoes, sitting in a comfortable chair, or getting a drink can also help break out of a bad feeling. Prioritizing the need to back away from intense moments can make this easier for you to accomplish.
Stories from Home: The further I get into parenting, the more I have realized that walking away is exactly the right thing to do when a disagreement with my kids has gone around the bend. It only gets worse from there. So, it’s now an “unbreakable” rule in our house that anyone can walk away to cool off, even if it’s right in the middle of a discussion.
What Can You Say Out Loud to Make This Better?
Many of the strategies for managing your emotions take place “behind the scenes,” or inside your own head. But especially in front of kids, it might be better to say it all out loud. Of course, “I had a bad day at work and I can’t deal with your questions right now!” is not going to be as effective as “I’m still thinking about work, so I need a minute before I can give you my full attention” in smoothing over the situation and modeling tools for your child.15
Stories from Home: One of our most successful tactics for dealing with our kids’ emotions in kids is to ask them a question like, “Do you just need a minute to feel sad?” or to say, “Let me know when you’re done being mad and I can give you a hug.” Recognizing their emotions like that has been really helpful, and they almost always take us up on the chance to have a minute to feel what they’re feeling and then are ready to move on. I thought this was only going to work with them as toddlers, but now we’re in the teen years and it still helps!
Key Point: You have choices when it comes to your emotions. Give yourself the chance to think through your emotional state and make decisions about whether to proceed as is or try to redirect or reframe your thoughts before continuing.
KIDS’ EMOTIONS: A WORK IN PROGRESS
There are six universal emotions that most people can quickly identify through facial expressions: disgust, anger, fear, surprise, happiness, and sadness.16 For example, surprise is observed with a slight drop to the jaw with eyes wide open exposing more white and an arch to the eyebrows. Most people don’t have to work very hard to identify emotions from these types of cues, but it can still be tricky to figure out why a particular emotion is coming at you in a particular moment. We need to think about whether the emotion being expressed is expected or unexpected, whether it’s a signal that the situation is risky, problematic, or dangerous, and what is the appropriate response to it—to respond in kind, to try to pacify it, to embrace it, or to ignore it. Sometimes, more than one response is required. Unsurprisingly, understanding and using emotion in a social interaction is difficult to do well and is a skill people work on throughout adulthood.17
Kids from a very young age recognize emotion, but it takes a lot longer to understand the nuance of what it means and how to react. To help this, we can find times to talk out loud about emotions in other people, whether on TV or in real life, which can serve as opportunities to analyze and better understand emotions as they unfold without the intensity of being in the moment personally. Childhood is a time for the slow but steady development of emotional understanding. During their early years, kids only have a limited ability to understand a verbal discussion of emotions. But as they progress through the preschool and school-age years, children become adept at several emotional components. These include:
•Increasing their awareness of their emotional experiences, including experiencing multiple emotions simultaneously (“I’m both excited and scared!”)
•Evaluating their own and others’ emotional states (“I get it that you’re mad at me.”)
•Learning how to use language related to emotions (“I’m really frustrated by this project.”)
•Learning to identify and empathize with others’ emotions (“I’d feel intimidated too if I had to go talk to the principal.”)
•Learning to regulate their own aversive or distressing emotions (“I know this isn’t the time to tell you that I’m upset because you just got out of a really hard test.”)
•Realizing that inner and outer emotional states may differ (“You say you’re fine but I think inside you’re still sad.”)
•Becoming aware that social relationships are in part defined by the communication of emotions (“I can tell that you trust me a lot because you told me how you’re feeling.”)
•Having the ability to self-regulate by shifting their thoughts intentionally, reframing situations, and examining different aspects of the problem.18 (“This is so unfair … but I guess I know that my brother did study a ton to earn that privilege, so I shouldn’t be that mad about it.”)
This is hard work and is not always a linear path. Some skills fall into place only to be forgotten in the next situation, while others seem intuitive and easy. This is one of the major developmental tasks set before children, and things don’t always go as planned. Just like adults, kids don’t always recognize when emotion is getting the better of them.
Stories from Home: My daughter sometimes asks for her brother’s help with things he’s better at than she is, like when she needs help with music. But she’s so frustrated by not being able to read music that she keeps yelling at him the whole time he’s trying to help her. I had to point it out and tell her that she was going to lose his help if she kept yelling at him. She didn’t even notice she was doing anything wrong because in her head, she was only mad about the music and not at him, but that’s not the way it was coming out!
Kids need us to show them how to evaluate and label their emotions, and to understand what happens, for better and worse, when they let their emotions show.19 Even if we’d rather bypass the emotional part of dealing with our kids and go straight to logic, this wouldn’t help your child understand their emotions or feel understood.
Key Point: Remember that understanding emotions is a process that unfolds throughout childhood, and needs explicit attention to help your kids gain competence in this area. Include your child in your thoughts about emotions (yours, theirs, and other people’s) to help them understand their impact.
THE LIFE RAFT OF ACTIVE LISTENING
It’s hard to believe, but we actually spend more time listening than talking. Overall, we spend the vast majority of our day engaged in communication tasks in general (reading, writing, speaking, and listening), and of these, listening is the most dominant. But unfortunately, we’re not that good at it. Research on comprehension and learning warns teachers to speak at below-average rates (in terms of words-per-minute) to increase the chances that their students will retain what’s been said because of exactly this weakness.20 Some say that in everyday interactions, we retain as little as 25% of what we hear. That’s not promising for creating productive conversations!
What we are actually very good at is making it seem like we’re really listening, when in fact we are not. We know how to make our faces look serious and tilt our heads to the side while making eye contact. We know how to nod our heads and say “mm-hmm” and even, when necessary, to repeat back (nearly identically) what someone has just said. While this may be a useful set of skills in some situations where your full attention is not needed, it falls short in others. Serious listening involves absorbing and thinking about the messages coming at us. The head-nodding and “uh-huh”-ing are just surface-level covers for an otherwise-engaged mind.
Our minds are busy places. Even when someone else is speaking, we’re usually also still occupied with our own thoughts. We think more quickly than we speak or listen, so most of the time there is an internal monologue running in our minds right alongside the external conversation. These thoughts could be focused on the conversation itself, or could be entirely unrelated. Sometimes the inner mind takes over so completely that you may realize that several minutes have passed in which you absorbed pretty much nothing of what the other person was saying. It happens to everyone. Even when we are actually focused on the immediate conversation, often the most pressing issue on our minds is what we’re going to say next, when it’s our turn again, and not on what the other person is trying to communicate to us. Forcing our attention entirely on the other person is hard work, and is not completely natural.
Active listening, on the other hand, involves bringing all of your focus toward understanding the other person, verbally, nonverbally, and emotionally. This means paying attention to what isn’t being said, in addition to what is. Emotions are so important to this that the term empathic congruence behavior was coined to describe how we need to not only understand ideas and attitudes from the other person’s perspective but also try to understand how they feel.21
Research shows that the process works—negotiators and mediators who use active listening are more likely to reach effective deals,22 and parents who use active listening are able to go beyond just understanding what a child is saying to also connect with and verbalize what the child is feeling.23 It works because not only do people feel more heard, but they even start to change the way they speak as they notice how seriously they are being taken.24 In a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),25 scientists saw this change and observed that it made people become more willing to cooperate and perceive the whole conversation more positively.
Key Point: Not every conversation with your kids requires active listening, but every negotiation with your kids will benefit from it. Whether you go into a negotiation on purpose or suddenly find yourself in one, this is the time to give your full attention.
The classic steps to engage in active listening have been described for many years and have been successfully applied in settings from families to FBI and crisis negotiations:26
•Preparing to listen: Clear your mind and any potential distractions, and focus your body and attention on your child to be ready to absorb what gets said. Doing this not only signals that they have your attention and respect but also changes the way you yourself feel and approach the conversation.
•Back-channeling: Show you are listening by engaging in small verbal and nonverbal responses, including saying things like “Okay” and “I see” and nodding your head. This can sometimes include “mirroring,” which is repeating back the last few words or main idea spoken.
•Asking open-ended questions: As opposed to asking yes–no questions or focusing on specific details, asking questions that broaden the opportunity for your child to speak can help to fill in more explanation and create better understanding. “Tell me more about …” is one open-ended prompt. Providing pauses to let your kids think and prepare to speak can also help get more out of the questions that you ask.
•Paraphrasing: Summarizing what your child just told you is a way to make sure that you’re really capturing the right information and that they feel heard by you. The paraphrasing can be of words or facts, or can be comments on tone or values such as “I can see that this is really important to you.”
•Reflecting on feelings: Being able to demonstrate empathy out loud gives both reassurance and validation to your child, such as, “I can understand why you’re upset.”
Each of these tactics works to put your child at ease, to demonstrate your commitment to their point of view, and to increase your actual comprehension of their perspective. The most effective listeners, then, are the ones who treat the whole interaction as a true collaboration, which naturally leads to tactics like asking probing questions, making suggestions, and caring about how the other person’s ideas and feelings are treated.27
Key Point: It’s far too easy to “coast” when your child is talking. Using active listening skills to focus on both the meaning and the emotions of your child can pay big dividends in terms of a successful outcome.
•Know your own “hot button” issues. Remember that once your temper flares, nothing good will happen immediately afterward in that interaction. Maintain strategies for getting through your own emotional moments (like taking a break from the situation entirely). Set ground rules for everyone about what is and isn’t acceptable when angry or upset.
•Listen to yourself as you interact with your child. Especially in emotional conversations, listening as if you were watching a recording of someone else can give you a different perspective on your tone. Are you modeling the behaviors that you want to be? What would you think of another parent saying the same words in the same way?
•Identify and discuss your own emotions with your children. In addition to labeling their emotions and taking them seriously, this will help them better understand both emotions in general, and your perspective in particular. Also know that this process is different at different ages. A young child can’t do much more than hear the labels, whereas a grade-school kid can understand how the emotion can be a problem to be addressed and solved. Older kids can still benefit from the identification of emotions (as can adults), as it helps to separate the emotion as something one person is experiencing from the interaction as a whole.
•Talk about other people’s emotional situations and displays. This will give you a common frame of reference and language, without the intensity of feeling the emotions yourselves.
•Consciously try out the active listening strategies. See what it changes in your conversations.
NOTES
1. Leary, K., Pillemer, J., & Wheeler, M. (2013). Negotiating with emotion. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2013/01/negotiating-with-emotion.
2. Gibson, D. E., Schweitzer, M. E., Callister, R. R., & Grey, B. (2009). The influence of anger expressions on outcomes in organizations. Negotiations and Conflict Management Research, 2(3), 236–262. doi: 10.1111/j.1750-4716.2009.00039.x.
3. Baron, R. S. (2000). Arousal, capacity, and intense indoctrination. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4(3), 238–254. doi: 10.1207/S15327957PSPR0403_3.
4. Hatfield, E., Bensman, L., Thornton, P., & Rapson, R. (2014). Facial mimicry and contagion. Interpersona, 8(2), 159–179. doi:10.5964/ijpr.v8i2.162.
5. Barsade, S. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675.
6. Barsade, S., & O’Neill, O. A. (2016). Managing your emotional culture. Harvard Business Review, January–February 2016, Reprint R1601C, 58–66.
7. Levin, D. Z., Kurtzberg, T. R., Phillips, K. W., & Lount, R. B. (2010). The role of affect in knowledge transfer. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 14, 123–142. doi: 10.1037/a0017317.
8. Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 256–274.
9. Curhan, J. R., & Pentland, A. (2007). Thin slices of negotiation: Predicting outcomes from conversational dynamics within the first 5 minutes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 802–811. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.802.
10. Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 45–55. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45.
11. Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2010). Switch: How to change things when change is hard. New York: Broadway Books.
12. Kopelman, S. (2014, May 16). Make your emotions work for you in negotiations. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/05/make-your-emotions-work-for-you-in-negotiations.
13. Campos, J. J., Mumme, D. L., Kermoian, R., & Campos, R. G. (1994). A functionalist perspective on the nature of emotion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(2–3), 284–303.
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