Negative Advocates: How They (We) Become Emotionally Hooked

January 2, 2025

Negative Advocates: How They (We) Become Emotionally Hooked

High conflict disputes usually involve one or more people with a high conflict personality – a pattern of conflict behavior that is preoccupied with blaming others, uses a lot of all-or-nothing thinking, has unmanaged or intense emotions, and engages in extreme behaviors that most people would never do. But, for a high conflict dispute to persist or escalate, it usually involves one or more negative advocates as well. Negative advocates justify, defend, and encourage high conflict people (HCPs), thinking they are helping a person in need, when in fact they are reinforcing an HCP’s negative behavior and adding to the conflict. Negative advocates are usually family members (sometimes children), friends, co-workers, and even professionals (therapists, lawyers, mediators, even judges), although anyone can be one and most of us have been on occasion. They get “emotionally hooked” by the emotions of the HCP but are usually uninformed about their high conflict behavior. They may have more credibility than the HCP, may be more emotionally intense, and therefore more persuasive than the HCP. (Eddy, 2015)

This article explains some of the brain dynamics of how negative advocates get emotionally hooked, so that we can deal with them in high conflict disputes and also avoid becoming negative advocates ourselves.

The Appeal of High Conflict Personalities

HCPs can be very charming at first, yet sooner or later they start expressing heightened anger and fear and may get stuck in emotional negativity. They can shift very suddenly from positive to negative and back or may just stay intensely negative in a campaign to dominate or destroy their targets. They tend to be frequently upset and communicate in simple terms with lots of emotion and repetition. This may be why they can be surprisingly successful at persuasion in court cases, workplace conflicts and community disputes. This is especially true if they have negative advocates backing them up or representing them to others.

The Amygdala Catches Fear and Anger

Generally, the left brain is the thinking brain and the right brain is the emotional brain. The amygdala in the right hemisphere (there is one in each hemisphere of the brain) is highly attuned to facial expressions of fear and anger, more than other emotions. This makes sense in order to help us rapidly join together in group action in times of crisis to protect ourselves. “When our level of emotional arousal becomes intense, the left hemisphere goes off-line and the right hemisphere dominates.” (Schore, 2019, 220) By shutting down our thinking with intense emotions, we may forget to check the facts of what is really going on.

You may get hooked into defensive action within a fraction of a second, finding yourself running, fighting, or hiding before you are even consciously aware of why you are doing these things. (Goleman, 2006, 39-40) Once we are committed to action, it’s hard to stop ourselves in our tracks.

Mirror Neurons

When the person in front of us is in tears or enraged and acting aggressively, our brains want to “mirror” them. This is based on neurons in our brains that are associated with our motor neurons, which fire when we see someone else engaged in an action as if we were doing the action, perhaps to get us ready to do it.

This may mean that we want to join with someone in angry behavior against someone else (“I agree, that person is such a jerk!”), or this may mean that we get angry at the upset person (“Let me tell you who’s in charge here!”). “According to the mirror neuron hypothesis of empathy, our mirror neurons fire when we see others expressing their emotions as if we were making those facial expressions ourselves. By means of this firing, the neurons also send signals to emotional brain centers in the limbic system to make us feel what other people feel.” (Iacoboni, 2008, 119)

Emotional Repetition

The effect of repetition shows that it can make us believe information that isn’t true but feels true. This is because of the “Illusion of Truth” effect. Researchers believe this is because of the “fluency” of the person’s communication, which means the ease with which the brain receives it. The more it’s repeated, the easier it is to absorb it because we have heard it before. In addition, statements are considered “more fluent and truthful” if they are presented in “an easy-to-read font” and simple, “easy-to-understand speech.” Statements that are presented in less “fluent” speech are often perceived to be less truthful. Interestingly, each time a statement is repeated, there is a decrease in the firing rate of the neurons involved in hearing it. (Hassan & Barber, 2021, 1)

This means that an HCP’s dramatic information may become locked in place fairly quickly in our brains after the first few times it is heard, especially emotional information. This is why negative advocates can get so easily hooked with so little information when it is presented so “fluently.”

Confirmatory Bias

Once a potential negative advocate has heard enough repetitions and has become confident in what they are hearing, how easy is it to change their mind? Brain research on confirmation bias has found that the neurons in our brain are more responsive to further evidence or information that confirms the original messages and that “dis-confirmatory evidence processing is abolished.” The brain simply stops even considering it. “We conclude that confidence shapes a selective neural gating for choice-consistent information, reducing the likelihood of changes of mind on the basis of new information.” (Rollwage, et al, 2020, 1)

In other words, the more confident you are that you are being told the truth by a high conflict person, the less likely you are to consider what anyone else has to say.

Amplification

Our brains remember stories with more emotional intensity compared to those with less. When we hear someone tell a dramatic story, we hear emotions of different intensities and see their faces go through various levels of intense expression, but we remember the most intense parts.

“People often remember only a subset of items in a sequence…. People attend and respond to faces expressing emotion faster than those not expressing emotion, and they also seem to find it more difficult to detach their attention from more emotional faces…. Furthermore, when a face changes back and forth from emotional states to more neutral states, it makes sense to ignore the less emotional expressions and to interpret the more emotional ones as reflecting the true emotion of that person.”

In short, we amplify to others the more intense emotions, the more negative emotions, the most recent emotions, and the longer sequences that we have seen and heard from others. Thus, the listener/observer absorbs and remembers the peaks of emotion more than the valleys. Apparently, this “occurs without intention and plays an important role in social judgements.” (Golderberg, et al, 2022, 1, 5)

Since high conflict people tend to express more words and facial expressions of intense fear and anger, people may become negative advocates by absorbing these emotions and amplifying them to others as more intense than the speaker originally expressed. This may be how children become negative advocates for a parent (“favored parent”) who has expressed intense anger, anxiety, or sadness about the other parent (“rejected parent”) at times. A child may express hatred for the rejected parent, when the favored parent does not feel the same way overall.

Likewise, it doesn’t take much for a perpetrator of domestic violence to exert coercive control over their victim once they have expressed one or more incidents of intense anger (with or without violence). It can be terrifying even when the perpetrator is calm. Thus, the victim/survivor may become a negative advocate for the perpetrator to others, minimizing or defending his actions out of fear.

This dynamic also occurs constantly on the internet, where people express a strong emotion about something, then calm down—but their listeners/observers pass on their peaks of intensity and it grows and grows. This is how mobs work, with everyone swept up in the growing emotional intensity of the group—without thinking.

Conclusion

Negative advocates can get emotionally hooked through various mechanisms in our brains without even realizing it. They can promote high conflict disputes unintentionally. They can resist outside information that does not fit their pre-conceived conclusions. For these reasons, there are at least five conclusions that we can make:

It is important to avoid becoming negative advocates for high conflict people in the first place. It helps to always have a healthy skepticism and ask yourself: Is what I’m being told really true? Am I emotionally hooked and uninformed? Am I being intensely asked to advocate for something I know very little about?
This helps us understand the importance of helping others avoid becoming negative advocates by explaining the process of how people become emotionally hooked and by informing them about a potentially high conflict issue before their feelings get locked in.
This is why a BIFF response is often better than no response when you are being falsely accused by a high conflict person. Otherwise, the intense emotions of the HCP may be persuasive and amplified by others. (Eddy, 2014)
This is why it is so important in an argument or legal dispute to get your point of view presented early, often, and in simple terms. It can help to think of your three most important points and repeat them several times rather than to present a long list of great ideas, none of which get emotionally absorbed.
Courts and all organizations dealing with high conflict situations need to educate the people who come to them about how intense emotions can be contagious so that individuals protect themselves from getting emotionally hooked and uninformed in their disputes. This is especially important for family courts to help parents prevent alienating a child against the other parent with their offhand, but intense, emotional remarks.

As we all learn about the nuances of high conflict disputes, they will have less power over our lives.

References:

Eddy, B. (2014). BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People, Their Personal Attacks, Hostile Email and Social Media Meltdowns. Unhooked Books.

Eddy, B. (2015). High Conflict People in Legal Disputes, 2nd Edition. Unhooked Books.

Golderberg, A., et al. (2022). “Amplification in the evaluation of multiple emotional expressions over time,” Nature Human Behaviour, www.nature.com/nathumbehave, July 2022, 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01390-y

Goleman, D. (2006). Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Bantam Dell.

Hassan, A. and Barber, S. (2021). “The Effects of Repetition Frequency on the Illusory Truth Effect,” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 6, no. 38, 1. http://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5.

Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rollwage, M. et al, (2020) “Confidence drives a neural confirmation bias,” Nature Communications, 11:2634, www.nature.com/naturecommunications.

Schore, A. (2019). Right Brain Psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

BILL EDDY, LCSW, Esq. is a family lawyer, therapist, mediator, and the Director of Innovation with the High Conflict Institute based in San Diego, California. He trains professionals worldwide about high conflict personalities and situations, presenting in over 35 states and 13 countries. He is the author of twenty books and manuals, including 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life ; and Our New World of Adult Bullies. He writes a blog for PsychologyToday.com with over 6 million views. He is on the Advisory Board of the Divorce Coalition and co-host of the podcast, It’s All Your Fault! with Megan Hunter, MBA. His website is www.HighConflictInstitute.com.