On Thursday, March 22, the Office of Student Development and Career Education and Development hosted another edition in the Leadership Lunch Series. This week’s event revolved around the topic of preventing conflict, and expert Dr. Ashley Parrish taught the audience about the psychology around emotional triggers. Dr. Parrish is the founder of Feeding the Wolf Consulting Company, named after a Cherokee legend. She is an organizational psychologist with a military background.

In her introduction, Dr. Parrish described the Cherokee proverb that inspired her to name her organization. It describes the existence of two wolves, each one representing good and bad. When asked, “Which one lives?” She replies, “The one you feed.” 

With this, she went on to explain the regions of your brain responsible for several functions that may be engaged during a conflict. The amygdala is responsible for the “flight, flight, or freeze” response. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex is in charge of rational decision-making.

Dr. Parrish shared personal experiences to demonstrate the usage of these parts of the brain during something called “amygdala hijacking”. “Most conflict comes from unmet needs,” quoted Parrish from a book on the matter she was recently reading.

Dr. Parrish discussed the work of Dr, David Rock who is regarded as the godfather of neuroleadership and SCARF. The SCARF model categorizes social domains in the brain into status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Dr. Parrish led the audience through an exercise to find out which of the domains they value most and how these domains play into conflict.

For more information on the Leadership Lunch Series visit Osprey Hub at: https://stockton.campuslabs.com/engage.