Human Behavior in Military Contexts (2008) / Chapter Skim
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6 Emotion
6 Emotion
Pages 55-63
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From page 55... ...
Military planners throughout history have incorporated an emotional element into training and operations. Training exercises are often designed to elicit the strong emotions soldiers will feel on the battlefield and to create the shared emotions that lead to esprit de corps.
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From page 56... ...
Researchers agree that emotion represents a universal and intrinsic aspect of human consciousness, which functions as an evaluative representation of the environment to the person experiencing the emotion and moderates important cognitive, behavioral, and physiological phenomena. Just as the human retina transduces light waves into the experience of color, the human mind transduces events in the environment into evaluative experiences, i.e., emotions.
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From page 57... ...
How can soldiers be trained to discern the ethical implications of their actions in a wide variety of situations, including the periods between operations? COGNITION AND EMOTION A person's affective state is primarily influenced by a mostly automatic process generically labeled evaluation (Bargh and Ferguson, 2000; Barrett, 2006a; Blascovich, in press; Brendl and Higgins, 1995; Lazarus and Folkman, 1984; Tesser and Martin, 1996)
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From page 58... ...
Military situations are fraught with uncertainty, and understanding the role of emotion in arriving at accurate situational awareness may prove useful in optimizing decision processes. Emotion has effects at all levels of cognitive processing; many of them are directly relevant to military contexts.
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From page 59... ...
. A related military application concerns postconflict behavior and understanding, such as how soldiers react to and treat captured enemy combatants and local civilians.
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From page 60... ...
If it is a viable concept, emotional intelligence could be relevant to many military problems, including: prevention and detection of PTSD and the timely return to combat duty, the selection of military recruits for specific roles on the basis of their levels of emotional intelligence, the training of soldiers to recognize emotions in themselves and others and to cope with extreme emotions, the training of leaders to manage emotions in themselves and their subordinates, and the design of training environments to simulate realistic scenarios that require emotionally adaptive skills. EMOTION AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR A wide variety of social behaviors is influenced by affect.
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From page 61... ...
For example, when troops interact closely with local populations, as they do during low-intensity warfare, there are inevitably cases in which troops suffer casualties due to "betrayal" by someone in that population. Such events can give rise to extremely negative attitudes and prejudices regarding the entire local population and lead to unwarranted actions against innocent indigents, which, in turn, disrupts attempts to build rapport with the population.
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From page 62... ...
An important research question for the military is how a team leader might promote collective efficacy and how he or she might inhibit the effects of contagion of negative emotion. Another leadership question concerns a component of emotional intelligence that relates to the perception of emotion in others and the ability to regulate emotion and motivation in others (Bar-On, 2004)
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From page 63... ...
. As the military increasingly trains and conducts missions with forces from different cultures, detailed knowledge of those cultural differences, in particular the emotional aspects of those cultures, will be important to mission success.
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