Map of Danube Delta

Dance Troupe

Brian at the Black Sea

Shauna at the Black Sea

Sulina Harbor

We’re now in Sulina, Romania, at the Casa Sibiana, for 2 days as guests of Liana, the main Ovidius University sponsor of our trip/training, and her retinue of friends and colleagues. On Saturday, we drove north from Constanta toward the Danube Delta region over hilly coastal farm region. Then, at Tulcea, a small city on one of the lower Danube channels, we boarded a river tour boat (Russian made) and rode about an hour east to the very end of the middle channel to Sulina, the last town before this channel empties into the Black Sea.  This area is called the Danube Delta, Romania, a fascinating place and one of the world’s greatest wetlands.

The town of Sulina is very traditional and charming, with a beautiful, old Orthodox church, a weathered lighthouse, and fishermen dotting the small lagoon. The town is a summer fishing and boating destination for Romanians, but isn’t very crowded at this time of year. After a late lunch of delicious fish stew and bread, we walked around the old multi-religion graveyard where many sea-faring nationalities are represented, including British. We continued our walk about 1 kilometer east, to the end of land and a wind-swept beach on the Black Sea, where we beach-combed briefly and looked up the coast to see the southern tip of Ukraine across the Bay!

Later that day, we came back to the Casa, and had a late dinner of tasty fish dishes, local sausage, cheeses, and bread.  After dinner, a local Greek/Macedonian dance troupe entertained us with traditional Romanian dances and music.  It was a wonderful day and we thank our hosts for showing us such a lovely area of their beautiful country land.

~Brian Luther and Shauna Ries from Romania

 Harter: I’m glad you asked that question, because my involvement in our collaborative project has had a profound impact on me, personally.  I see four such arenas.  First, it has enhanced my own commitment to being an authentic self in my daily interactions with others. Second, and relatedly, it has sensitized me to the importance of acknowledging my emotions, first to myself, and then in my interpersonal relationships where emotions must be expressed in a constructive manner, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than compromising it negatively.  This, at times in my life, has been a challenge. Third, I have always been a proponent of self-determination and feel that my own life and career bear that out. The notion of empowerment in the inAccord model has, therefore, been particularly appealing.  Seeing its power in the model, as it applied to mediation, has strengthened my resolve to appreciate the importance of empowerment in my own life.  Furthermore, as a professor, it is quality that I hope to encourage and nurture in my students.  Fourth, my new knowledge about specific skills that can foster authenticity and can improve my own interpersonal negotiation abilities has been invaluable.  I have become better at reflecting as well as reframing issues that may be problematic, and clearly notice the positive benefits of these skills in my own interpersonal interactions.  Finally, enacting these various principles has definitely had a major impact on my own enhanced ability to live and love.

Harter:  Most definitely!  There is a clear convergence between the inAccord Model’s new focus on identifying both positive and negative emotions and two present trends in the field of Psychology.  The first is the acknowledgement that positive emotions play an important role in people’s lives, that they have a function.  For years, the field was dominated by an inordinate emphasis on emphasis on negative emotions, for example, fear, anger, and depression.  These affects were highlighted because they were assumed to be the major players on the stage of  one’s psychological life, they were touted as highly functional, from an evolutionary perspective (for example, the fight or flight reaction to fear, as emphasized by Charles Darwin and later by William James).  Positive emotions were given short shrift, they were viewed as relatively non-functional and, as a result, were simply not studied.  Recent work counters this belief and identifies several functions that are critical to the inAccord Model.  For example, Frederickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions makes the claim that positive affects serve to widen the array of thoughts and actions available to the individual, they produce more flexible tendencies and solutions to life’s challenges. As a result of a broadened mind set, one has access to more personal coping resources and is more receptive or open to new information that promotes creativity.  These capacities, in turn, enhance the likelihood of success in the future.  The second building function first requires broadening, toward the goal of providing a source of agency or self-determination, akin to the concept of empowerment in the inAccord model. It spurs one toward the creation of solutions.  As a result, this new trend dovetails very nicely with the new focus on positive emotions in the inAccord model, granting them legitimacy as powerful forces in resolving conflict. Each of these functions are front and center, in the inAccord Model.

The second recent trend has been the identification of a new subfield in psychology, labeled Positive Psychology.  Martin Seligman spearheading this movement, as its founder.  Seligman and followers decried the over-emphasis on negativity within the field at large, urging psychologists to shift their focus to positive topics such as optimism, gratitude, serenity, hope, precisely those psychological commodities that have found their way into the inAccord model.

Beyond the traditional emphasis on negative emotions, the field has historicall been consumed by negative diagnostic labels are pejorative, demeaning and stigmatizing individuals who come to therapy.  The inAccord model as applied to mediation offers an alternative to the potentially negative effects of some therapies.  Individuals are not viewed as helpless, pathological creatures with deep-seated problems that are resistant to change.  Mediation offers an alternative that provides a hopeful path to conflict resolution, one that encourages self-determination, as individuals are empowered to take active role in solving one’s own problems, and in so doing, are granted a sense of dignity.  Empowerment has much in common with another relatively new concept in the field of psychology, the concept of self-efficacy, first introduced by Albert Bandura.  Self-efficacy refers to the belief that the person has the power to personally make positive goals actually happen in his/her life.

Harter: That is a critical question.  The answer is at the heart of another theme that has dominated my own thinking and research.  People must first learn to get in touch with their emotions that are powerful forces in their lives, some of which can be destructive, some of which can be constructive.  Disputants must first be encouraged to acknowledge their own emotional states, as realistically as possible.  Mediators must be trained to assist disputants in labeling and expressing their feelings rather than moving too quickly to cognitive skill development.  Thus, the design and inclusion, in our collaborative research, of a self-report survey to enquire about disputants’ perceptions of their own emotion is critical, as a first step.  As you have described, often the initial emotions are intense and not always manageable.  More, your own contribution of addressing two categories of emotions, those that are empowering as well as those that are disempowering is a major contribution of this work.  A major contribution of your own thinking has been to illuminate the notion of a match or a mismatch between disputant emotions, where a match means that both disputants report the same type of emotions, that is, both indicate that they experience either empowering emotions or disempowering emotions.  In contrast, a mismatch is observed when one party reports empowering emotions but the other party reports disempowering emotions.  You have developed a very convincing case that the issue of a match versus a mismatch has profound implications for the intervention approach that a mediator selects.  This focus on emotions represents a very creative contribution to the field of mediation.

Harter: Quite simply, they are totally and directly antithetical.  The inAccord model emphasizes transparency, akin to authenticity as I discussed earlier.  Toward this goal, the inAccord model identifies specific skills to encourage disputants to get in touch with their true feelings, and to do so with clarity.  Inflated self-enhancement has no place in this model, given that it compromises those types of authentic interpersonal interactions necessary if disputants are to actively resolve the conflict.  But before one can move to the acquisition of new skill sets, many of which are cognitively based, there is some groundwork that needs to be laid.

Harter: I describe many of these barriers to authenticity in my recent 2012 book entitled The development of the self: Developmental and sociocultural foundations published by the Guilford Press. The contemporary self is a cause for concern.  Social psychologists studying adults have identified numerous self-enhancement strategies, self-serving biases, unrealistic or inaccurate self-perceptions, as well as narcissistic tendencies that compromise the authenticity of the self and, in the process, dilute the quality of one’s interpersonal relationships.  In my book, I trace the developmental origins of these pernicious paths to self-deception, many of which are actively supported by our socialization practices.  For example, there has been a startling national initiative to raise the self-esteem of our nation’s children and adolescents in recent years, with our schools at the hub of this movement, which began in California a number of years ago.  Critics of this craze have argued that children’s sense of self-esteem and competencies are being inflated unrealistically, rather than focusing on the acquisition of actual skills and abilities.  Studies also reveal that narcissism is on the rise in our nation, beginning in adolescence.  Too many of our youth are encouraged by their parents to feel entitled when they do not deserve this mantle.

 Harter: My first answer would be that both our illustrious developmental and clinical theories, historically, were based on models of conflict..  Jean Piaget, the giant for many years in the field of cognitive- developmental psychology, saw conflict as essential.  He used an interesting French word, perturbation, to refer to the fact that the infant’s and child’s worlds, their environments, is constantly posing challenges that “perturb” their existing repertoire of skills, by which he meant that they demand a stretch in the form of new learning.  So conflict really propeled development and learning, from his perspective.  And of course from a clinical perspective, Sigmund Freud’s well-known concepts of the id, ego, and super-ego defined the intrapsychic conflict that individuals experience.  The id was the repository of instincts such as sex and aggression in “battle” or in conflict with the superego, one’s conscience or moral values. The supergo’s job goal was to tame unacceptable id impulses and behaviors.  Then the ego’s job definition was to literally be a mediator, attempting to resolve and balance the conflicts between the id and the superego, a harrowing task to be sure. Therefore, conflict for humans is inevitable from both developmental and clinical perspectives.  And thus, my general interest in conflict.  Of course, beginning in childhood and continuing into adolescence and adulthood, one observes a great deal of normative interpersonal conflict. In recent years, psychologists have developed intervention programs to help children and adolescents learn new social skills, allowing them resolve such disputes.  For all of these reasons, I come by my interest in Mediators without Borders very naturally.