ABSTRACT
Managing a person in crisis’ emotions is a significant challenge for productive crisis negotiation. Often, a person in crisis becomes overwhelmed by their unfolding circumstances. Overt emotional expression paralyses their ability for clear, rational thought, thereby stalling negotiations. This chapter explores the conversational practices negotiators and other professionals use to calm people’s strong emotions in crisis and work towards a de-escalation. The chapter begins with a background of how researchers and practitioners conceptualize emotion, outlining where training might fall short of explaining what happens in practice. By presenting actual examples from emergency calls and negotiations, we identify when and how professionals apply training methods such as repetitive persistence and explain why they work to regain attention but do not always succeed as an emotion management tool. By the end of this chapter, readers will learn how voice tone variations convey, for example, concern versus responsiveness, and how to apply this learning to their interactions. Moreover, readers will understand how the grammatical nuances of talk work to enlist a person in crisis’s cooperation and engages them in a task that focuses on crisis resolution.
