Dissonance is the feeling of inconsistency or conflict between ideas, actions or feelings. Cognitive dissonance happens when a person holds two conflicting ideas or concepts within her mind simultaneously. These ideas may involve herself, the ones around her or both. Emotional dissonance happens when a felt emotion makes conflict on a person’s self-concept or when expressed feelings aren’t genuine.
Types of Emotional Dissonance
Someone who forces themself to cover his true feelings, for example individuals who operate in customer support or sales, can experience emotional dissonance. It’s generally experienced when someone is hurt or angered by another’s rude behavior, yet feels compelled to exhibit a polite or kind exterior no matter what his/her true feelings are. Another kind of emotional dissonance happens whenever a person’s experienced feelings enter into direct conflict together with his perceived identity. For instance, a guy that has always considered themself a pacifist can experience emotional dissonance upon realizing he felt pleasure and exhilaration upon losing his temper and striking someone else.
Types of Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance may pertain to a world unknown to the individual. For instance, an individual might be happy with as being a citizen from the U.S. and think that it upholds “freedom and justice for all”. However, realizing the country was built on slavery can create a feeling of cognitive dissonance. This may also occur regarding an individual’s identity. If an individual thinks themself to become a good and moral person, yet he sees that he from time to time cheats and steals, this may produce cognitive dissonance.
Subjective Versus Objective
Emotional dissonance is definitely a subjective experience because feelings are strictly subjective. Most commonly it is experienced as a menace to an individual’s identity and might be more unsettling than cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance could be either subjective or objective because it doesn’t always need to call an individual’s identity into question, but should call into question the details of the world he knows of.
Coping Methods
Many people who experience cognitive dissonance can alleviate the discomfort by creating explanations to warrant one idea to the other one. For instance, an individual who feels dissonance over stealing despite thinking about themself moral might tell themself the incident is minor since it happens rarely. Emotional dissonance might be harder to treat, and could require someone to visit a counselor or broaden his idea of themself to be able to alleviate it.