Emotional Mediation: Understanding How Affect Shapes Mediation Tactics in Conflict

Mediation is considered one of the most common and primary tools of third party intervention in conflict disputes. Borrowing insights from political psychology, this article discusses how the emotional content of mediation influences its strategies and outcomes. We ask whether and how mediators’ perceptions of disputants’ emotionality in combination with their own styles of affective regulation can determine mediation strategies (i.e. communicator, formulator/facilitator, manipulator /motivator). Using data from semi-structured interviews with international and national mediators, we find that emotions of mediators and the perceptions of disputant emotions are interrelated, and both serve as important components of mediation towards successful outcomes.