Emotional Contagion Proposal

As a group, we are interested in studying whether emotional contagion takes place when groups participate in computer-mediated communication. Emotional contagion refers to the ability to transfer moods between individuals in a group. Specifically, we are looking to study whether one person being sad can make other people sad when they communicate in groups online. Research has shown that emotions can be transferred when people are together in groups (Barsade, 2002). Additionally, there is evidence that emotional contagion also occurs between two people when they communicate in a computer-mediated setting (Hancock, Gee & Lin, 2008). Therefore, we want to determine whether emotional contagion takes place when both of these conditions (i.e. groups of people and computer setting) are applied. Thus we propose the following research question:

RQ1: Will emotional contagion occur when groups participate in computer-mediated communication?

To study the effects that computer-mediated communication in groups has on emotional contagion, we will put volunteers in a situation where they have to interact through computers. So that these subjects can get to know one another before the study begins, we will have them introduce themselves over the computer. Two student volunteers will participate, and one confederate will also engage in the computer-mediated communication. The confederate will display negative emotions in an online chat setting. The participants, two volunteers and one confederate, will be given the task of coming up with a list of twenty things to do at Cornell, because this kind of creative conversation will allow the confederate to express negative emotions, and will allow for extensive dialogue to occur between the participants. After the conversation has been completed, the students will be debriefed on the study and its purpose. There will also be a control group, wherein all three participants will be volunteers and they will be given the same task.

To measure whether emotional contagion occurred in conversation, the words used in conversation will be measured by a computer to determine the valence and strength of the emotions expressed by the volunteers as the conversation progressed. We also plan to use the dialogue produced by participants to conduct discourse analyses that will allow us to determine differences between experimental and control conditions in emotions shared, perceived and "caught".

Currently, there are quite a few issues that we need to resolve before finalizing our proposal. First, we are still unsure about what linguistic differences we should focus on specifically in studying emotional contagion in computer-mediated groups. Second, we need to find an appropriate setting in which the participants can interact online. One suggestion is that we use Google Wave, although as of right now we don’t exactly know how that would work. Third, to measure the results of the study, we will also need a computer program that will help us to code the words used by the participants and what they indicate about the participants’ emotions. As of right now, we are also not sure what program we can use for linguistic analysis or how to use it. Fourth, we need to determine whether inducing emotion in a participant, or using an experimental confederate to share emotions would be most appropriate for this study. Finally, there is also the possibility of comparing the effects of positive versus negative emotions in these settings to determine if one set of emotions is more easily "caught" than the other.

References

Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47, 644 – 675.

Hancock, J.T., Gee, K., Ciaccio, K., & Lin, J.M. (2008). I’m sad you’re sad: Emotional contagion in CMC. Proceedings of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. San Diego, CA, USA.

Assignment Three

Hello Professor Hancock and 4500 students! Welcome to the blog of Team 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. In class last week, our team took an important pledge. As we held our right hand on Clark’s Using Language and our left hand in the air, each of us solemnly swore to “ pull my own weight, to work hard for the benefit of the group, to contact any and all group members should I be unable to complete a task given to me, and to always go for the gold (defined as working to the best of our abilities whenever our abilities allow).”

While meeting to discuss the readings, multiple members of our group expressed interest in the politeness section at the end of chapter 12. In a face-to-face conversation prompting a joint commitment to a task, Clark found that (1) the less threatening the joint task person A proposes, the more polite person A is judged to be by person B; if the task is accepted (2) the less threatening the response is to person B’s self-worth, the more polite person A is judged by person B; and finally if the task is declined, (3) the more legitimately person B accounts for declining the task, the more polite person B is judged by person A. In other words, Clark declares that the politeness of an inquiry (using words like “please”) will indicate how polite the response will be (using words like “certainly I can help” or “I’m sorry I can’t). Our team thought it might be interesting to research whether or not Clark’s hypotheses of politeness holds equally true in a computer mediated setting where providing information with the greatest concision and economy is placed at a premium. Based on Susan Herring’s article on Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, we understood that a good research question is both open-ended and motivated by a hypothesis. Therefore, we present the following experimental design based on the idea that politeness in the CMC setting will be based on speed and accuracy of response rather than a reflection of self worth.

To test the hypothesis we have designed an experiment in which a subject will be asked to find out the time, place, and location of a concert at Cornell University. The events information will not be posted online, and the subject will be told that the only way to receive the information is by texting the event coordinator whose phone number is provided. The events coordinator will, of course, be a confederate, who is either told to answer the subjects questions with responses that project an equal equity (“yes of course I can provide you with the time, it’s at 6:00”), or alternatively, with responses that are short and simply answer the question with no additional fluff (“it’s at 6:00”). Additionally, the confederate will either answer quickly (within 60 seconds) or delayed (~3 minutes).

After the subject has engaged in text-conversation with the confederate, they will be given a survey asking a number of questions, with the goal in mind of analyzing how polite they deemed to confederate to be throughout the conversation. Based on our hypothesis, we assume that the fast response condition will be rated more polite than the delayed response condition, even though none of the polite jargon that Clark describes had been used.

While this experimental design is rather simple, we needed to make sure the data we collected was “not trivial” as Herring dictates. Therefore, looking at our design in a macro sense, this experiment will help us understand how individuals gauge politeness online; a venue where more and more important business transactions are taking place. By understanding how people evaluate politeness online (for example valuing quick responses over more elaborate, but delayed responses) we can understand how to best economize our language use online for the most efficient and mutually agreeable computer mediated experience.