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Space and breath
In a meeting that is turning into an argument, stepping back can be literal. Sliding the chair away from the table changes the perspective and widens the field of view. SEAL radio calls work the same way. A panicked voice on the radio spreads panic to other people, so the habit was to take a deliberate breath before keying the mic and slow the breathing down by hand.
Body position
Body position matters too. Getting defensive usually means hands up and chin down, which is a fighting posture. Lifting the chin and lowering the hands changes the visual perspective just by changing the angle of the head, and it puts a person in a mode where they want to hear what the other side has to say.
Listening more
Closing the mouth is part of it, because it is hard to be detached while talking. A person who mostly listens in a meeting is better able to spot the holes in other people's plans. The same applies at home. When a partner gets frustrated, a mental step back can reveal that they want to vent, so the right move is to let them vent and ask what they plan to do instead of handing over a fix.
The ability can absolutely be trained. Some people end up better at it than others, and SEAL leaders and people in business have both developed it.
Why does a panicked voice spread panic?
Listeners read emotion from pitch, speed, and tremor in a voice, often faster than they process the words. Psychologist Klaus Scherer, who has studied the vocal expression of emotion for decades, found that fear and stress tend to raise the pitch and quicken the pace of speech. People tend to mirror the emotion they hear, the same mimicry behind what researchers call emotional contagion. Scherer and colleagues also showed that listeners can identify emotions such as anger and fear from voice alone at rates well above chance.
Why does picturing yourself from outside calm anger?
Psychologists call it self-distancing: viewing an upsetting moment as an observer would, rather than reliving it through one's own eyes. In a 2005 study, Ethan Kross, Özlem Ayduk, and Walter Mischel asked people to recall an angering experience from either a self-immersed or a distanced view. Those who took the distanced view reported less emotional reactivity, and they described the event in terms of reasons and meaning rather than replaying it. Later work by Kross found similar effects when people referred to themselves by name or in the third person.
Why does the body brace during an argument?
A threat triggers the sympathetic nervous system, which raises heart rate, tightens muscles, and prepares the body to fight or flee. Physiologist Walter Cannon named this the fight-or-flight response in his 1915 book on bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage. Raised hands and a lowered chin are the same guarding movements seen in an actual fight. Social threats such as criticism and conflict set off the reaction too: the Trier Social Stress Test, developed in 1993 by Clemens Kirschbaum and colleagues, raises cortisol and heart rate by having people give a speech and do arithmetic in front of judges.
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