Emotional buttons: how they affect your relationships

Today we are going to talk about the emotional sensitive points shared by the majority. Emotional buttons that affect many aspects of our livesalthough it is in our relationships with others where they can produce higher friction, causing us to become defensive and in some cases even explode with anger.

These emotional buttons They are more problematic for some people than for others. Knowing and managing them is a guarantee of control over situations in which we feel rejected, whether real or imaginary.

People who see criticism of themselves everywhere and overreact to other people’s opinions can claim to have especially sensitive emotional buttons. This is known in psychology as rejection sensitivity. They are people who maintain a constant expectation about the idea of ​​not being liked or rejected by others.

A study carried out by Long Island University concludes that These people are certain that the most likely outcome of their interpersonal exchanges will be rejection.. This is why they are especially prepared to detect signals that indicate rejection by others, which can occur at any time.

Pushing emotional buttons

The act of voluntarily or involuntarily pushing these people’s emotional buttons generates, almost immediately, maladaptive and desperate responses. This causes escape behaviors, retaliation against perceived aggression, or deliberate emotional distance attitudes to develop.

Over time, and if these emotional buttons are not regulatedpeople tend to completely avoid relationships with others, even when they feel they need them. This is “unresolvable tension” and what is created is a vicious circle: what you are fearing will happen is exactly what ends up happening due to the means or conditions that are put in place for it to happen.

This avoidance of relationships ends up going both ways.. The person fears interacting with others due to the irrational fear of their rejection, but others also end up not interacting with them due to their exaggerated responses.

Breaking the cycle

If we manage to change any part of the situation, we can break this dynamic of fear of rejection and mutual avoidance. This is what Kevin Meehan’s research team tried to analyze in their study: how to change the dynamic to break this cycle.

The volunteers were 228 undergraduate students who were provided with a mobile phone application. The objective was for them to use it to rate the emotions they felt throughout the dayin addition to indicating other things that were happening around him.

With the data obtained through this method, the team established a basic pattern and They chose one of the students to continue the study. The volunteer had scored high on rejection sensitivity and they evaluated the data.

It seems that the high sensitivity that the person targeted by the study had led to the development of a negativity bias to dominant people who interacted with her and made her behave in a hostile manner.

Perceiving oneself in this way made the person begin to take certain measures to calibrate the exaggerated reaction. to the activation of your emotional buttons. In a first analysis, it seems that it was much easier to adopt a less assertive and warmer posture with close people than with strangers.

An excellent starting point

This study predicts new and interesting monitoring of the behaviors and emotions of people with a high level of activation of emotional buttons; studies that can follow offering us very relevant and useful information for its application in therapy.

In this sense, perhaps the most important thing about this research has been the confirmation that, on many occasions, It is our own emotional buttons that trigger the situations we fear the most..