Integration of negative emotions, empathy, and support for conciliatory policies in intractable conflicts

Adaptive regulation of intense negative emotions appears crucial for reconciliation, as negative emotions often impede the resolution of intractable intergroup conflicts. Integrative emotion regulation (IER; actively taking an interest in one’s own negative emotions) appears promising in this context, given previous findings of its links to empathy and support for conciliatory policies in the context of the Middle East conflict. However, prior work did not test whether these links hold when negative emotions related to the conflict (e.g. anger and fear) are elicited. We conducted two studies with Jewish-Israelis to test these links, focusing on participants’ reactions to innocent Palestinians. In both studies, we measured IER, empathy (sympathy, perspective-taking), and support for conciliatory policies (humanitarian aid) and compared a negative emotion condition (Study 1: fear, N = 240; Study 2: anger, N = 293) to a neutral control condition. Our findings replicated the positive relations between IER, empathy, and support for conciliatory policies even when negative emotions were elicited. These findings are discussed in relation to prior research on emotion regulation in group contexts, including applications to conflict resolution.