Does Feeling Heard Improve Emotional Responses to Worldview Conflict?

Abstract

We commonly encounter conflicting attitudes and opinions. Past research finds that encountering worldview conflict elicits temporarily lowered mood and psychological well-being (Brandt et al., 2019). Understanding how to mitigate these negative emotional consequences of worldview conflict may help improve people’s everyday experiences. Research has found that in close relationships feeling heard in a conflict can increase well-being (Gordon et al., 2013; Reis et al., 2017). We extended these findings to the study of worldview conflict. Participants completed series of open-ended and closed-ended questions to recall and describe a recent political discussion, focusing on the following: how the discussion went, to what extent they felt a range of specified emotions immediately after the discussion, how they perceived the other, and whether they felt heard by the other. We hypothesized that higher scores on the feeling heard scale would be associated with lower scores on negative emotions (particularly other condemning emotions) and higher scores on positive emotions (particularly happiness) following the discussion. Results supported our hypotheses. Higher scores on the feeling heard scale were associated with lower reported negative emotions, especially other-condemning emotions, as well as increased reported positive emotions. For some conversation topics (i.e., abortion), feeling heard seemed to have a bigger impact on mitigating negative and fostering positive emotions, while for other topics (i.e., COVID) feeling heard was not as strong a predictor of emotional reaction. This study may help guide future research on the topic of how to improve people’s experiences of worldview conflict.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Craig Blatz