Collective emotions and emotion regulation in intractable conflicts

This chapter focuses on the role of different collective emotional elements in creating, preserving, and resolving intractable conflicts. The main premise is that collective emotions play a pivotal role in shaping individual and societal responses to conflicting events as well as in contributing to the evolvement of social contexts that maintain the emotional climate and collective emotional orientation that have developed. The chapter deals mainly with the mutual relations between long-term emotions as part of the context of the conflict (i.e., collective emotional orientation, emotional sentiments, and emotional climate) and group-based emotions evoked as individual-level reactions to conflict-related events. Finally, in addition to describing the emotional process which takes place within an intractable conflict, it will also introduce strategies of collective emotion regulation as a possible path for constructive conflict resolution.