CRE Terms Glossary
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This is a glossary of terms related to the field of conflict resolution education. You'll find the terms followed by a short definition and any related terms that you might want to become familiar with.
- Accommodation/smoothing
- A style of conflict resolution in which one person gives in or accedes to the wishes of the other
- Acknowledgment
- confirming behavior that indicates awareness of or interest in the other person's perceptions, comments, or questions
- Action-oriented listeners
- listeners who concentrate mostly on the task at hand and prefer to listen to people who present information in a logical and organized way
- Affect displays
- spontaneous facial expression of emotion
- Bargaining
- Competitive negotiation process
- Bargaining range
- The overlap of the settlement ranges of the bargainers
- Biases
- Perceiving something in a way that is not accurate
- Brainstorming
- Generating ideas for solving a problem before evaluating or critiquing those ideas
- Bullying
- Repeated, intentional aggressive behavior intended to harm another and to create power imbalance
- Caucusing
- When a mediator meets individually with one of the parties in the mediation to talk about issues
- Causal inference
- Assumptions we make about what causes a certain effect, usually refers to judgments we make about why people do things
- Certainty communication
- Defensive communication that suggests you are completely right and completely certain that you are right
- Clarifying response
- a confirming behavior that acknowledges someone by asking for more information about what they've just said or done
- Classroom agreements
- Agreements negotiated by students and teachers about acceptable behavior in the classroom
- Classroom management style
- A general tendency to be either hands-on, hands-off or hands-together as a style of dealing with classroom management
- Classroom meetings
- Having students in a class convene for a discussion of issues or activity.
- Classroom rules
- Specific rules for behavior in a classroom, usually created by teacher and students
- Cognitive perspective taking
- being able to understand how a person sees a situation, what his or her needs and interests are in that situation
- Collaborative strategies
- conflict management strategies in which concern for the self and the other fully merge, and conflicts are seen as residing within the relationship, thus, only mutually satisfying solutions are acceptable
- Collectivistic cultures
- cultures that encourage interdependence among members, teaching them the importance of allegiance to in-groups, that provide continued protection in exchange for loyalty
- Co-mediation
- A mediation process in which two mediators work together
- Co-mediator
- One of the team of mediators in co-mediation - usually the one that is less in charge of the mediation
- Communication
- the process of constructing meaning through the sharing of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and information with others
- Communication-facilitation
- A mediator strategy that uses search for information, instruction, and supportive communication to uncover the nature of the conflict
- Communication resources
- communication behaviors, skills and competencies that help us accomplish what we want to communicatively
- Communicative competence
- learning to achieve language skills and nonverbal skills that promote social interaction, such as making friends and dealing with conflict
- Competing/forcing
- a conflict resolution style that is win-lose, shows a strong concern for the self but a low concern for the other
- Compliment
- a confirming behavior, a way of endorsing someone by saying something positive about him or her
- Compromising
- a conflict resolution style that involves splitting the difference or a give and take approach, shows a moderate concern for self and a moderate concern for other
- Concessions
- Giving a little on an issue in bargaining to try and come to an agreement
- Confidentiality
- The idea in mediation that what is said in mediation is not shared with anyone outside the mediation
- Confirmation
- you accept the right of the other person to define you, himself or herself, or the relationship
- Confirmation bias
- Once we have an impression of the other person, our tendency to keep seeing them that way, even if there is information to the contrary
- Conflict
- the expression of a disagreement between two or more interdependent people about what should be done and/or how it should be done
- Conflict competence
- the ability to manage conflict positively and functionally
- Conflict escalation
- occurs when the feelings associated with the conflict become more hostile, when the behaviors used in conflict become more aggressive, when the positions taken in the conflict become more extreme, and when the willingness to adopt cooperative orientation to the conflict decreases
- Conflict resolution education
- teaching children how to manage conflict effectively and giving them life skills that will empower them to be happier, more successful citizens
- Conflict styles
- A tendency we have for how we deal with conflict - a general approach to conflict management
- Connection power
- Influence we get because of who we know
- Contact cultures
- cultures that use more touch and less personal space (e.g., Arab, Latin American, and Southern European nations) than do members of non-contact cultures
- Contact hypothesis
- predicts that making contact with stereotyped individuals and interacting with them over time will break down the stereotypes we have about them
- Contempt
- an emotion resulting from perceived superiority, often expressed as an insult
- Content
- the information we exchange and the understandings we achieve
- Content level
- gives the ",content", or basic data of the message, denotative meaning, what the words actually mean
- Control communication
- Defensive communication that directs or tells the other what to do
- Criteria
- In principled negotiation and/or mediation, the standards used to determine whether a solution meets the interests of the parties and should be selected
- Criticism
- Verbal behavior that attacks the relational partner's personality or character, presents as a general deficit, not of a specific action or issue
- Cultural context
- the layers of culture that influence our communication in any given interaction
- Cultural display rules
- rules based on our cultural expectations that guide us in terms of appropriate behavior in a given situation
- Cultural identity
- views of ourselves that we share with other people in that culture based on influences in the culture
- Cultural sensitivity
- Understanding that there are different emotional cultures as well as the ability to appropriately follow the display rules prescribing and proscribing emotional expression
- Culture
- shared ways of behaving and interpreting common to an identity group
- Defensive climates
- a climate or atmosphere that is created when a person perceives or anticipates a threat to their face or identity
- Defensive communication
- Communication that makes someone else more likely to become defensive
- Defensiveness
- communication behaviors devoted to resisting or preventing aggression or attack from a relational partner
- Descriptive communication
- Non-defensive communication that describes something rather than evaluates
- Direct acknowledgment
- a confirming behavior that acknowledges the other by directly signaling that you have heard and understand their request or statement
- Disconfirmation
- behavior that communicates that the sender does not have the right of self-definition
- Display rules
- a culturally created understanding of how we should strategically show or express something
- Disqualification
- the most sophisticated form of disconfirmation, looks as if you are responding to the other, but you answer refuses to engage them. Can take one of four forms: disqualify the sender, disqualify the receiver, disqualify the content, disqualify the context
- Distributive approaches
- competitive approaches to conflict, assuming the parties are in conflict over the allocation of some scarce resource and that each party wishes to win as much of that resource as possible
- Dysfunctional conflict
- a conflict where one or both parties are dissatisfied with the process or outcome (or both) of the conflict management
- Emotion coaching
- a five-step process for teaching children basic skills of emotional competence
- Emotion scripts
- sets of expectations for how we should react emotionally in certain situations in order to be appropriate, acting surprised at a surprise party
- Emotional acknowledgment
- a confirming behavior that acknowledges someone by telling him or her you notice the emotion he or she has expressed
- Emotional awareness
- awareness of one's own and other's emotions
- Emotional competence
- knowing how to express emotions to fit the situation, the culture, and personal needs, understanding how to discern one's emotional state and others' emotional states, understanding the vocabulary of emotion, coping with aversive and pleasurable emotional situations, using emotions strategically and at an appropriate time, a developmental process
- Emotional contagion
- being ",infected", by the emotions of others, physiological mimicking of another's emotions that triggers similar emotional experience in you
- Emotional expressivity
- willingness and ability to express one's emotions
- Emotional flooding
- being swamped by emotion to the extent that you cannot think effectively
- Emotional immaturity
- inability to behave in an emotionally competent way due to development that has yet to occur in the social or cognitive domain
- Emotional incompetence
- through developmentally able, a person is unable to manage his or her emotions at the same level as his or her age and culture expect
- Emotional intelligence
- the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, motivating ourselves, and managing emotions effectively in ourselves and in our relationships
- Emotional perspective taking
- the ability to understand how the other person is feeling and why they are feeling that way
- Emotional regulation
- learning to control one's impulses to respond emotionally
- Emotions
- the feelings that motivate us to act in all facets of life
- Empathy
- the ability to feel what someone else is feeling
- Empathy communication
- Non-defensive communication that shows you can understand the other person's experience
- Endorsement
- confirming behavior that sends the message, ",The way you are feeling is okay,", or ",The way you are perceiving is okay.
- Equality communication
- Non-defensive communication that treats the other person as an equal
- Ethnocentrism
- the belief that one's culture is the center of everything and therefore superior to other cultures. Encourages people to apply the norms and standards of their own culture when judging other cultures: ",This is the way we do it, so this is the way everyone should do it.",
- Evaluation communication
- Defensive communication that judges the other
- Expertise power
- Influence we have because of a general area of expertise or knowledge we have, like computer programming
- Face
- Goffman's notion of the self we want to present in interaction
- Face work
- ongoing, yet often implicit process of trying to present our ",face", in interactions
- Facilitate emotional reappraisal
- a process of elicitive questions and conversation that enable people to change the way they experience a situation and, by doing so, change how they feel about it
- Facilitator
- A third party who focuses on re-establishing communication between disputing parties but who does not become involved in substantive issues
- Forgiveness
- no longer being upset with someone because of what he or she did
- Frame of reference
- our view of the world and the assumptions we make about reality as shaped by our prior experiences
- Functional conflict
- a conflict where both parties are pleased with the process and outcome of the conflict management
- Fundamental attribution error
- A perceptual bias where we tend to blame the person rather than the situation for an event
- Generating Options
- In principled negotiation and/or mediation, the process of generating ideas or options for solution
- Gender
- the socially prescribed expectations or roles for people of a particular sex, usually discussed in terms of masculinity, femininity, or androgyny
- Generative conflict
- creating conflicts that are functional in order to enhance creativity and constructive change
- Giving face
- Doing something to restore or give back someone's identity or face after it has been attacked
- Goal-congruent emotions
- In Lazarus's theory, positive emotions: compassion, happiness, hope, love pride, relief
- Goal-incongruent emotions
- in Lazarus' theory, negative emotions: anger, anxiety, disgust, envy, fright, guilt, jealousy, sadness, shame
- Halo effect
- a perceptual bias where we assume that a person has many positive qualities if they have one positive quality
- Haptics
- the study of nonverbal touch
- High context (HC) communication
- a message in which most of the information is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, a concept used to distinguish cultures
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