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A scoping review on effective measurements of emotional responses in teamwork contexts

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Abstract

Effective collaboration within teams relies significantly on emotion regulation, a process vital for managing and navigating emotional responses. Various methods have been employed to measure emotional responses in team contexts, including self-report questionnaires, behavioral coding, and physiological measures. This review paper aims to summarize studies conducted in teamwork contexts that measured team members' emotional responses, with a particular focus on the methods used. The findings from these studies can lead to identification of emotion regulation strategies and can lead to effective interventions to improve team performance in future. The core question guiding this review is: What are effective measures in capturing individuals' emotional responses in team dynamics? Using a scoping review, the study aims to answer three research questions (RQs): 1: What was the distribution over time of the studies that examined team members’ emotional responses and/or regulation of emotions in team dynamic? 2: What type(s) of data were collected, and what are the theories used in these studies? 3: What are the advantages and challenges of each type of measurement on emotional responses in team dynamics? The synthesis of the findings suggests that multimodal data, combining various measures such as physiological data, observations, and self-reports, offer a promising approach to capturing emotions in teamwork contexts. Furthermore, combining multimodal data can benefit capturing individual and inter-personal regulation, including self-, co-, and social emotion regulation in teamwork. This paper highlights the importance of integrating multiple measurement methods and provides insights into the advantages and challenges associated with each approach.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Jason M. Harley and Dr. Adam K. Dubé for their invaluable contributions and insightful feedback during the development of the first draft of this article.

Funding

This work is supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) awarded to Xiaoshasn Huang and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the grant number of 895–2011-1006. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper, however, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the FRQSC and the SSHRC.

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Xiaoshan Huang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology (ECP) at McGill University, and a member of the ATLAS (Advanced Technologies for Learning in Authentic Settings) Lab. Her areas of research interests include investigating learners’ cognition, motivation, and emotion regulation in both academia and the workplace using intelligent tutoring systems, as well as socially shared regulation in collaborative learning.

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Appendix A

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Table 5

Table 5 Summary of data modality, analytic focus, and regulation modes

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Huang, X., Lajoie, S.P. A scoping review on effective measurements of emotional responses in teamwork contexts. Curr Psychol 43, 25661–25682 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06235-7

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