How Emotional Reactivity Causes Conflict

This is the behavior that makes it difficult to stay positive around negative people. It's where we tend to overreact negatively to normal situations due to stress, exhaustion, or an emotional disorder.

Just as how we offend other people because we feel offended and both sides of the dynamic think that they're merely reacting to the other. It happens in any relationship, familial or social.

This is the extreme form of emotional reactivity. What happens is that:

• We tend to recall past disputes with revised dialogues (when they said this, I should've said that);
• We imagine arguments that haven't taken place yet; and
• We feel that other people make us angry and are trying to get on our nerves.

Emotional reactivity spreads as quickly as lightning due to the salience of negative emotions and their vast contagion.