Life is full of frustrating people and situations. Driving in a car, you may get cut off by a
driver on a cell phone. A colleague at
work may fail to complete an important task that makes it harder for you to do
your job. A friend may leave you out of
a social event, which makes you feel excluded.
Your long-term relationships are affected by how you deal
with these frustrations. You may never
see the bad driver again, but your driving habits after being cut off may
affect the drivers around you. Getting
angry with a friend or colleague can cause tension in that relationship. Talking with people who have let you down or
hurt your feelings can help to repair the damage their actions caused.
An interesting paper in the October, 2013 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Michael Robinson, Adam Fetterman, Kay Hopkins, and
Sukumarakurup Krishnakumar examined the role of social competence in dealing
with these kinds of everyday frustrations.
The idea behind social competence is that there are many
ways to react to situations, and some of them are more constructive than
others. People who are better at
identifying the most constructive ways to deal with situations may also do a
better job of dealing with life’s frustrations.
As a measure of social competence, the authors identified
many work-related scenarios that were dilemmas, but were not obviously
frustrating. For example, an executive
at work may find out that one of her employees is struggling with an alcohol
problem. People are presented with four
possible actions (such as forgiving the employee, asking about personal
problems, and ignoring the situation) and are asked to rate the effectiveness
of these responses. Their ratings are
compared against the ratings of experts.
Previous work suggested that this measure was a good predictor of
behavior in a work environment.
In one study, the researchers compared people’s scores on
this test of social competence to their score on a scale that measures how
often they react aggressively when they get angry. The higher the scores on the test of social
competence, the lower was people’s tendency react aggressively when angry. This relationship held, even after
considering other core personality traits like agreeableness (which measures
how much people want to get along with others) and emotional stability.
In another study, a group of people who had taken the test
of social competence filled out a daily diary for 14 days. In this diary, they noted any frustrating
events that happened during the day and then rated whether they engaged in
aggressive behaviors like insulting someone, criticizing them, or arguing. They also noted any mental lapses like
forgetting an appointment or having difficulty making a decision. Previous work shows that when people get
frustrated, they experience more cognitive problems during the day.
Overall, people with low scores on the test of social
competence were more aggressive and had more mental lapses than those with high
scores on the test of social competence.
This effect was particularly strong on days that had many frustrations
in them in which people had interpersonal conflicts or did not get things that
they wanted.
