Research Proposal

Introduction

When working in groups it is inevitable that group members will have some effect on each other’s cognitions, attitudes and behaviors. In fact, much research in groups focuses not only on how others affect our attitudes and behaviors (Bateman, Griffin & Rubenstein, 1987; Shetzer, 1993), but also on how their presence alters our moods or emotions (Totterdell, Kellet, Teuchmann & Briner, 1998; Totterdell, 2000; Barsade, 2002; Kessler & Hollbach, 2004). Emotional contagion is a type of social influence and refers to the transfer of moods, or the sharing of emotions, between people in a group (Barsade, 2002). According to Barsade (2002), emotional contagion is the process through which “a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotional states and behavioral attitudes” (p. 646). A key factor in this theory is the notion that people do not live on “emotional islands,” but rather affect those around them as their moods “ripple” outwards in what Barsade calls the ripple effect.

Many studies have demonstrated emotional contagion in face-to-face contexts, with both dyads and groups (Barsade, 2002; Sullins, 1991), but understanding emotional expression and contagion from a computer-mediated communication (CMC) context is a little studied phenomenon. Though early work suggested that emotional contagion required others to perceive emotions via nonverbal cues, rather than words (Mehrabian, 1972), recent research in CMC, which lack nonverbal cues, demonstrates that perception of emotions and emotional contagion are possible in CMC (Hancock, Gee, Ciaccio, & Lin, 2008; Walther, Granka & Loh, 2005).

Conveying and Perceiving Emotions in CMC

Mehrabian (1972) argues that ostentatious verbal displays of emotion are generally discouraged in social settings. Thus emotions must be conveyed in “less consensual and less easily recognizable forms.” (pp. vii). These forms manifest in gestures, facial expressions, body movements and other nonverbal cues. More specifically, Mehrabian suggests that the reason nonverbal cues are more important in conveying emotion is that they provide a subtle, implicit means of communicating (e.g., slumping one’s shoulders to indicate sadness), rather than explicitly sharing emotions through words (e.g., telling a friend, “I am feeling sad.”).

Early theories of CMC shared Mehrabian’s (1972) view that communication would suffer without nonverbal cues (Kiesler, Siegal, & McGuire, 1984; Sproul & Kiesler, 1986). This perspective, dubbed the Cues Filtered Out model by Culnan and Markus (1987), suggests that functions of nonverbal cues are unaddressed in CMC due to their absence. This perspective is problematic not only because it draws from theories developed to study other media, but also because more sophisticated studies of online communication suggest the opposite (Walther & Parks, 2002).

The social information processing (SIP) theory of CMC suggests that relationships between communicators in CMC can reach the same level of closeness as face-to-face (ftf) relationships, but that this takes longer due to the slower rate at which information is shared (Walther, 1992). Nonverbal cues in this case are substituted by “content, style and timing of verbal messages online” (pp. 535, Walther & Parks, 2002). One particular study demonstrated that users are able to express emotion in CMC via emoticons and other verbal expressions and that communication partners were in fact able to discriminate between emotions that their partners shared (Walther, Loh, Granka, 2005). Recent research of dyadic CMC conversations also suggests that emotional contagion can occur, regardless of the presence of nonverbal cues (Hancock, Gee, Ciaccio, & Lin, 2008).

Emotional Contagion in CMC

Hancock et al. (2008) make several crucial advances in demonstrating the potential to convey and transfer emotions in the absence of nonverbal cues. Specifically, their research sought to determine whether others’ emotions could be perceived in CMC and whether these emotions would transfer to the communication partner. Because nonverbal cues are absent in CMC, they predicted that emotions would be transferred via linguistic cues. These predictions are not necessarily in opposition to Mehrabian’s (1972) claims about communication as the linguistic cues identified by Hancock et al. (2008) may also be viewed as subtle, implicit means of conveying emotion. Hancock et al. (2008) demonstrate that without nonverbal cues, communication partners can perceive negative emotion and experience negative moods as a result of interacting with a negative emotion experiencer (i.e., a participant induced to feel negative emotion).

Though Hancock et al. (2008) demonstrate emotional contagion in dyadic interactions, will the same be true for groups? Small group researchers in many contexts have demonstrated detriments to group satisfaction, participation and cooperation that often occur as groups become larger (Kerr, 1989; Markham, Dansereau & Alutto, 1982; Pinto & Crow, 1982). It seems that larger group size should also be detrimental to emotional contagion, which should occur with lesser intensity as group size increases. This is because cognitive resources become more distributed amongst group members. A major component of the process of emotional contagion is the recognition of emotion in other individuals (Barsade, 2002). If group members’ attention is distributed among many individuals simultaneously, emotions in other individuals will be more difficult to recognize, and thus will be less contagious (Hatfield et al., 1992; 1994). Thus we pose the following research question:

R1: Will emotional contagion occur in a group CMC setting?

Linguistic cues to emotion. As previous research has demonstrated linguistic cues are important when conveying and “catching” emotions in CMC (Hancock et al., 2007; Hancock et al., 2008; Walther, Loh, & Granka, 2005). In general, linguistic cues to emotion refer to both the sounds and the displays produced in language. Though previous research demonstrates the importance of gestures and facial expressions in conveying emotion (Mehrabian, 1972; D’Mello, Craig, & Grasser, 2008), linguistic cues to emotion exist in CMC and differ between positive and negative emotions (Hancock et al., 2008; Hancock, Landrigan, & Silver, 2007; Walther, Loh, & Granka, 2005).

One experiment found differences in verbosity, punctuation, agreement, and the use of affective words between individuals experiencing positive versus negative emotions (Hancock et al., 2007). Specifically, users displaying happiness in CMC tended to type more, use more punctuation, agree more with their communication partners and use more positive affect words compared to negative emotion experiencers who did the opposite. Hancock et al. (2008) provide similar findings suggesting that individuals experiencing negative emotion use fewer words overall and use more negative affect words. Walther et al. (2005) also demonstrated linguistic cues to express affinity (i.e., liking), which included sharing overt statements of positive affection, expressions of joy, offers of encouragement, and personal information. We use these findings to pose the following hypotheses for expression of negative emotion CMC groups:

H1: Group members sharing negative emotion in CMC will produce fewer words compared to members in groups sharing no specific emotions.

H2: Group members sharing negative emotion in CMC will use less punctuation compared to members in groups sharing no specific emotions.

H3: Group members sharing negative emotion in CMC will use more negative affect words compared to members in groups sharing no specific emotions.

H4: Group members sharing negative emotion in CMC will disagree more often with group members compared to members in groups sharing no specific emotions.

Additional Cues to Emotion in CMC. Although CMC changes how people convey emotion to one another, it does not limit emotional cues to being shared through text. Instead, it shifts the portrayal of emotion to a variety of nonverbal cues that can be expressed online. Emoticons, for example, are used to convey emotion in CMC. People use emoticons most often to convey emotions with a strong positive valence, similar to how they would use facial expressions in face-to-face communication (Derks, Bos, & Von Grumbkow, 2008). Additionally, in instant-messaging situations, people reported that the amount of time it takes for someone to respond to a message can be used as an indicator of emotion, with people with positive emotions responding more quickly than people with negative emotions (Hancock et al., 2007). However, empirical data suggested that this indicator may not be significant. Based on this previous research we propose the following research questions:

RQ2: Will group members sharing negative emotion in CMC share more negative emoticons compared to members in groups sharing no specific emotions?

RQ3: Will group members sharing negative emotion in CMC respond more slowly compared to members in groups sharing no specific emotions?

Group member characteristics. Communication in CMC is often carried out by partners who have prior information about each other. Sender characteristics (e.g., gender) and sender-receiver relationships (e.g., strength of ties) aid the perception of emotional content in CMC (Byron, 2008). For example, with respect to gender, men are more likely to express negative emotions (Witmer & Katzman, 1997), and receivers are more likely to identify negative emotions when they are expressed by men (Rotter & Rotter, 1988). Also, the strength of the tie between the communicators will affect how accurately emotions are perceived in CMC. Communicating partners with little mutual history have been found to inaccurately assess the other's emotions (Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994). Whereas when two communicators have a longer relationship, their perceptions of each other will be more accurately as their communication will tend to be more relational and sociable (Walther et al., 1994). We thus propose the final research questions:

RQ4: Will negative emotion be identified more easily in all male groups compared to all female groups?

RQ5: Will negative emotion be identified more easily in acquainted groups compared to unacquainted groups?

Proposed Method

To study the effects that CMC in groups has on emotional contagion, we will put volunteers in a situation where they have to interact through computers. We want the subjects to get to know one another before the study begins, so we have three main options: we may have them interact in a face-to-face setting, we may give them time to interact in a mediated setting before we assign them a task, or we may simply use subjects who already know one another. For our study, we need one person in the CMC setting to display negative affect. We can either induce emotion in one of the participants or we can use a confederate to outwardly display negative emotion while interacting with the study participants.

The participants will be given a task that encourages open conversation between the participants, because this kind of creative discourse will allow one person to overtly 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 LIWC (Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales, & Booth, 2007), a computer program used to determine the valence and strength of 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."

References

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