Get What You Need: Need Fulfillment as Implicit Emotion Regulation for Conflict Resolution

Abstract: Anger constitutes a barrier to conflict resolution, often leading to escalation and hindering reconciliation. As such, examining reconciliation through the lens of emotional regulation becomes significant. Two prominent approaches to the study of reconciliation have focused either solely on emotion regulation or solely on need fulfillment. Integrating these theoretical frameworks to extend existing conflict resolution approaches, we suggest that need fulfillment is a form of implicit emotion regulation. In three preregistered experiments (Ns = 268, 326, 348), we employed a work-related conflict scenario to induce unfulfilled needs for status and justice – both associated with anger. Unfulfilled needs for status (Experiments 1-3) and justice (Experiment 3) were associated with anger. Fulfilling these needs–by the perpetrator (Experiments 1-2) or by another person (Experiment 3)–decreased anger and, in turn, increased willingness to reconcile with the perpetrator. We discuss generalizability of our findings and the theoretical and practical implications for conflict resolution.

Keywords: need fulfillment, conflict resolution, reconciliation, implicit emotion regulation, anger