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CYTED-RITOS International Workshop on Groupware

CRIWG 2014: Collaboration and Technology pp 153–168Cite as

Performance Effects of Positive and Negative Affective States in a Collaborative Information Seeking Task

  • Conference paper

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 8658)

Abstract

Collaborative information seeking (CIS) is a common process carried out by groups in a wide variety of situations and contexts. From family activities to business tasks, people typically engage in collaborative search practices while working toward a common goal. In collaborative settings, various aspects of human behavior influence the way people interact with each other and make decisions. One of these aspects corresponds to emotions and related affective processes such as mood and feelings. Studies in social psychology have suggested that group dynamics and their performance may be affected by the interaction of affective processes, in particular positive and negative ones. Although such findings have been derived in different group situations, to the best of our knowledge none of them refer to the particular case of CIS. Based on previous studies, we investigate to what extent positive and negative affective states relate to group performance in CIS. To carry out this study, we designed an experiment with 45 dyads distributed in three configurations based on initial affective states: (1) positive-positive, (2) positive-negative, and (3) negative-negative. To achieve these initial conditions, members of each dyad were individually exposed to affective stimuli. Following, each dyad worked on a precision-oriented search task. Our results suggest that the three interactions of affective states have different implications on the performance of dyads. In particular, the negative-negative configuration performed significantly better than the other two configurations. Conversely, performance of the positive-negative condition was found to be significantly lower than the other two conditions. Findings from this work have practical implications for applications such as team design in tasks involving CIS.

Keywords

  • collaboration
  • information seeking
  • affective states
  • performance

The work reported here is supported by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Early Career Development Grant #RE-04-12-0105-12.

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-10166-8_14
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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Avenida Ecuador #3659, Estación Central, Santiago, Chile

    Roberto González-Ibáñez

  2. School of Communication and Information (SC&I)Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 4 Huntington St., New Brunswick, NJ, 08901-1071, USA

    Chirag Shah

Authors
  1. Roberto González-Ibáñez
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  2. Chirag Shah
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Universidad de Chile, Blanco Encalada, 2120, Santiago, Chile

    Nelson Baloian

  2. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield Campus, 3145, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Frada Burstein

  3. Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, 744, Motooa, 819-0395, Nhishi-ku, Fukuoka, Japan

    Hiroaki Ogata

  4. Centro de Ciências Exatas e da Terra, Departamento de Informática Aplicada, Universidade Federal do Estado, Avenida Pasteur, 758, Urca, 22245-040, Rio lde Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Flavia Santoro

  5. Diagonal Paraquay 257, 8330015, Santiago, Chile

    Gustavo Zurita

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González-Ibáñez, R., Shah, C. (2014). Performance Effects of Positive and Negative Affective States in a Collaborative Information Seeking Task. In: Baloian, N., Burstein, F., Ogata, H., Santoro, F., Zurita, G. (eds) Collaboration and Technology. CRIWG 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10166-8_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10166-8_14

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