You can guess where I’m going with this. There’s a strong case for clearing the air, for several reasons. First, as long as you’re tense, your deliberate system is unlikely to be mustering your best social skills, even as you’re supposedly smoothing things over. Second, far from lowering the ante, trying to suppress negative emotion has been shown to make the brain’s defensive response even more pronounced.10 Third, confirmation bias means that you’re likely to see ever more sources of annoyance in this person over time, rather than being able to move on, because your expectations of this
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