Neuroscience of Conflict Resolution - Toronto, May 29, 2009

Hello, and thank you again for attending the program. I very much enjoyed your group. And I am happy to see that you are here.

As I said at the program, unless you review the material presented, you will forget. I hope you have gone over your notes since Friday? Click for some information about the Curve of Forgetting.

The more ways you work with the material, the stronger will be your learning.

Learning = More Neuron Connections
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• Listen
• Write parrot notes
• Write notes, thoughts & reflections
• Discuss
• Use
• Teach
• Draw*

*Click for information about using drawings to enrich your thinking and learning.

Now here is some more information about topics discussed in our workshop . . .

More about the Gross and Thompson model of emotion regulation:

• Regulating in-the-way emotions in conflict resolution
• Read more in the book Handbook of Emotion Regulation

More about the elements of the CARVE Disputes Model™

C—Curiosity

• Relationship between anxiety and curiosity
• Research on the use of curiosity in conflict (has not yet been published)
• Interviews of Todd Kashdan, author of the book Curious?

A—Attention

• A tight grip on your mental flashlight is the deciding skill in conflict resolution
• Book: Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

R—Reflection

• What's the quickest route from reactive brain to reflective mind?
• Mind and brain hygiene

V—Values

• The values assessment
• Your values: One way to lessen the stress of conflict

E—Ensemble

• Our brain interacts with other brains so to study the single brain can be a misleading abstraction
• Article about emotional contagion
• Click here and scroll down to the sections on mirror neurons and emotional contagion
• Books: Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience and Emotional Contagion

Other items I mentioned on Friday and said I would send to you

• Interview of Jonah Lehrer about how we make decisions
• More about cognitive reframing/reappraisal
• Another myth: It takes 21 days to make or break a habit
• The study about the use of mental rehearsal to increase strength
• The documentary "The Musical Brain"

Please be sure to check back at this blog as I add more research and resources. For example, later this month, I will be talking about more research done by Dr. Jason Mitchell; here is a post about some of Mitchell's earlier research which I described on Friday.

Again, thanks very much for attending the seminar!