The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 104

The recording elicited less strongly subjects' responses when the higher-ranking
opponent had engaged in friendly interactions of reconciliation after a fight than
when the opponent had not shown a friendly behavior. Hence, reconciliation plays
a crucial role in mollifying low-ranking members and restoring the relationships to
normal tolerance levels thanks to the realignment of emotional states.
Concerning consolation, de Waal and Aureli ( 1996 ) have discovered that ritual
contacts between a recipient of aggression and individuals that were present at the
fight happen more often in the first moments after the conflict. Moreover, these first
contacts consist of a greater number of embraces and touches than later contacts.
For instance, macaques exhibit an unsolicited consolation hugging other members
who had been molested by a third individual (de Waal 1996a ); the behavior has the
effect to help the recipient of assault to mitigate distress. To spontaneously provide
consolation is thought to require some level of emotional perspective-taking, which
allows the bystander to both recognize the emotional state of the victim and to
provide the appropriate response to reduce distress. In this sense, consolation is
a complex ritual capacity deeply tied to emotions.
Hence, the widespread rituals of reconciliation and consolation have the function
of reestablishing relations and fostering social cohesion by limiting the effects of
aggressiveness and raising forbearance. In this view, collective rituals seem to bind
groups together specifically because of the emotionally charged symbols of which
they are made of (Alcorta and Sosis 2005 ). In particular, emotions provide a tool
for the synchronization of motivational states among participants, which in turn
facilitates the creation of cooperative alliances.
Human rituals, although more complex, seem to undertake similar functions
(Sosis and Bressler 2003 ): just reflecting on our everyday life, we see that our need
to overcome competition leads us to employ various rituals, which represent critical
mechanisms of conflict management. What ritual participation does is increasing
confidence and cooperation among members by feeding a group identity. Recently,
Levenson ( 2003a ) has argued that in humans, ritual is deeply tied to emotional
and empathetic conditions. In particular, ritual practices elicit in participants
autonomic body states—involved in the control of visceral functions that are
highly unconscious—that provide the context for the creation of communally sacred
things. It is the shared emotional and empathetic response elicited by such symbols
that provides a mechanism for trust and cooperation, motivating and coordinating
individual behaviors across time and space. Consistent with these claims, some
studies (d'Aquili and Newberg 1999 ; Newberg et al. 2001 , 2003 ) have investigated
the brain function of people engaged in the ritual of prayer and meditation. The
interesting discovery is that these collective activities trigger a unique pattern of
cerebral activation, namely, the sensation to belong to a oneness corresponds to
a decrease in the activity of the left posterior parietal lobe and a wide general
increase in the right hemisphere associated with unconscious emotional states. In
other words, to participate in a collective ritual as prayer is proved to involve the
deactivation of spatial awareness and the outbreak of ecstatic states associated with
strong emotions.