AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW OF THE PREMISES AND CAUSES OF CONFLICT INTERACTIONS

The paper presents interdisciplinary views on the causes and premises of conflict interactions, initiated in the behavioral plane by force of verbal and non-verbal conflict triggers. The relation of genetic, situational short-term and socially-acquired long-term factors to the emergence of inner psychophysiological states of the individual, fostering conflict interactions, is reviewed from a psychophysiological perspective. A linguopragmatic aspect of unleashing interpersonal conflicts is examined in the light of the theory of face, well-known in linguistic studies, where face represents a social value, which a person endeavors to obtain, preserve and restore by means of certain communicative acts, including those leading to conflicts. A specific attention is paid to explicit face-threatening acts embodying impoliteness and rudeness, as well as implicit face-threatening acts, apt to initiate a conflict in a more manipulative way. Results of the integrative review of the premises and causes of conflict interactions are presented in the form of a combined classification, the levels of which are placed according to the logic of a hierarchical interrelationship between psychophysiological, psychoenergetic and linguopragmatic factors of the conflict behavior initiation by the communicator. Classification criteria include psychophysiological factors of conflict initiation (genetic, situational, socially-acquired), the instinctive function that feeds the rise of conflict energetically (discharge of an unpleasant affect or generation of a pleasant affect), the dominant cause of conflict (cognitive, social, economic), the way of making an insult (implicit or explicit) and the type of the conflict trigger (verbal, non-verbal, verbal and non-verbal).