Establishing a Laboratory to Better Study Mood Synchronicity

Shared affective states have a powerful impact on collaboration. It remains unclear to what extent different collaboration media (e.g., voice, video, text) enable the formation of shared affective states. This grant creates a laboratory that can simulate different types of collaborative tasks, so we can study how shared affect forms and evolves among team members when they use different communication media. Importantly, this laboratory includes parallel physiological measures for attention, emotion, and engagement. These measures can be combined with behavioral and self-reported data from participants. This will allow us to compare the types of instinctive mechanisms that allow teams to form shared affect and the types of intentional strategies they adopt to complement these.