Running Head: Emotional Intractability

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate how people’s gender role identities (self-identified masculinity and femininity) affect their perceptions of the emotional role of the humiliated victim in conflicts (and the norms surrounding the role), and how these perceptions affect the negativity and aggressiveness of their responses and the degree to which they ruminate over conflict and remain hostile over time. Design/methodology/approach – This paper builds on literature on humiliation, aggression, gender, and rumination and presents a correlational scenario study with 96 male graduate students from a large Northeastern University. Findings Males with high masculine gender-role identities were more likely to perceive the social norms surrounding a humiliating conflictual encounter as privileging aggression, and to report intentions to act accordingly, than males with high feminine gender role identities. Furthermore, participants were more likely to ruminate about the conflict, and therefore maintain their anger and aggressive intentions a week later, when they perceived the situation to privilege aggression. Research limitations/implications – This paper sheds light on how aspects of peoples’ identities can affect their perceptions of social norms (i.e., whether or not aggression is condoned), and degrees of dysphoric rumination and aggression in conflict. Subsequent research should investigate the social conditions influencing these processes. Originality/value Research on the psychology of humiliation has identified it as a central factor in many intractable conflicts. However, this is the first study to begin to specify the nature this relationship and to investigate it in a laboratory setting. Emotional Intractability 3 Emotional Intractability: Gender, Anger, Aggression and Rumination in Conflict “The shameful photos are evil humiliation for Muslim men and women in the Abu Ghraib prison...Where is the sense of honor, where is the rage? Where is the anger for God’s religion? Where is the sense of veneration of Muslims, and where is the sense of vengeance for the honor of Muslim men and women in the Crusader’s prisons?” Statement by masked terrorist on a video of the beheading of American Nicholas Berg, 2004 (Friedman, 2003, Sunday, November 9) If we listen carefully to the words of many of those who express a desire to annihilate the Western world, the reason they give is revenge for humiliation. Feelings of humiliation are among the strongest emotions in humans (Lindner, 2002), and when used to mobilize people to conflict, can be all-consuming and become deeply woven into an individual’s basic sense of who he or she is (Maalouf, 2001; Margalit, 2002). As we look at the many violent conflicts around the globe today, it is not difficult to see the connections between severe emotions such as humiliation and rage with retaliation and aggression. However, our understanding of how these emotions operate psychologically in conflict, and when they lead to prolonged patterns of counter-humiliation and violence, remains unclear. This article builds on previous research on humiliation, gender, rumination and aggression, and presents a study which investigates how people’s gender-role identities affect their perceptions of the emotional role of the humiliated victim in conflicts, and how these perceptions affect the negativity and aggressiveness of their responses and the degree to which they ruminate over conflict and remain hostile over time. It has four sections: 1) a brief discussion of humiliation and anger, 2) an overview of how emotional experiences are psycho-socially determined and how emotional roles and gender role Emotional Intractability 4 identities can influence people’s experiences of and reactions to social conflict, 3) the hypotheses, methods, and results of our study are presented, and 4) the implications of the research are discussed.