Assignment #4 - Language, Emotion, and CMC
Kailyn Gee, Kevin Ciaccio, Sarah Aslam, Jennifer Lin
Our project will examine the ways in which emotion is expressed through CMC. Additionally, we will study whether the expression of emotion can be detected in this medium.
Specifically, we plan to determine whether the sadness portrayed by one individual can be detected by a neutral partner through instant messaging. A question we hope to answer is the following: in this medium, what methods, if any, will the subject use to convey his mood? This question is additionally complicated by our prediction that during conversation, partners will attempt to match their communication styles with each other; this trend is known as communication accommodation theory. For instance, if one subject uses his language to convey a sad mood, his partner will similarly adopt a depressing writing style.
Our project will emulate a previous study completed in 2005. The purpose of this previous study was to determine whether emotion could be detected through instant messaging. It concluded that significant changes in language use occurred depending on whether the participant was happy or sad. Moreover, a neutral subject was easily able to detect his partner’s mood. A significant drawback to this study, however, was that the emotion communicated was not genuine. At the beginning of the experiment, one participant was asked to deliberately act happy or sad while conversing with his partner. After communicating, his partner was then asked whether he could detect the portrayal of the feigned emotion. Our study will improve upon the previous research by provoking a genuine emotion in our subjects before asking them to interact. We plan to induce the emotion of sadness by showing our participants a video clip. From a meta-analysis report, it has been shown that the best mood induction procedure (MIP) is video.
Procedure
We will have two participants arrive at different locations to ensure that they do not meet. Subject A will be shown a sad video clip and asked to empathize with the characters within. Following that, he will be asked to fill out a questionnaire to allow us to detect his current mood. In order to ensure that Subject A does not realize we plan to study his emotions, we will frame the second part of the experiment as a completely different study. In this part of the experiment, we will have Subject A interact with Subject B through instant messaging. After communicating with each other, we will have both subjects fill out a questionnaire to rate the mood of Subject A.
Following the experiment, we will use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program to analyze the emotion expressed through instant messaging. This will allow us to precisely determine the ways in which language use is affected by emotion. For example, the previous study specifically found that when participants were sad, they used more affect terms and negations but fewer words and assents in their communication.
posted by jenny @ 10:27 AM
4 Comments:
As I was reading your post, I was thinking to myself, "how are they going to measure emotion?" Then, when I read up to the part where you mentioned the previous study about how they told people to pretend to feel sad and have a CMC conversation with another party and later ask the other party whether they were able to detect the feigned emotion, I think that inducing genuine emotion (even though i think it's much harder to do), is more interesting to analyze.
A concern that I have for your experiment is, what if your subjects don't feel sadness as they are supposed to feel after watching the video clip? How sure are you that the subject will feel sad? And, if they don't feel sad as indicated by the survey that you will have them complete, are you still going to let them go on to the latter part of the experiment? Also, if the subject does feel sad after watching the video clip, will their sadness be gone by the time they finish the survey? How evanescent is sadness?
The communication accommodation theory is an interesting concept. The theory does seem to be true at least for face-to-face conversation. I know that I will start feeling happy and optimistic if the other person is in a good mood. However, I never noticed as to whether this occurs when I talk to someone online. It would be interesting to see if a person actually adopts his/her writing style to the partner’s mood in an online communication setting.
I was just wondering as Lisa mentioned, for the experiment, how will you ensure that Subject A actually feels sad after viewing the video clip? If you ask him/her to empathize with the characters, then wouldn’t that be the same as asking the subject to deliberately feel a certain way?
I'm a little concerned, as Lisa said, at how you can actually be sure that the person's sad feelings come out in an experimental setting. I assume that many participants would actually try to ignore these feelings and speak naturally so that (or so they think) the experiment will actually proceed as planned. I think that people adapt the way they act to certain situations; even if they feel a bit sad after watching the video, it may be easy to ignore these feelings when their attention is focused on a different task. Perhaps the results would be clearer if A felt sad for B's sake, rather than for the people in the video.
I think I have the same concerns as Lisa about measuring sadness, although I also know that there are easy remedies to allay these fears. First of all, you need to be sure that your movie can be is universally going to create sadness without harming the participant, and secondly, make sure your questionnaire determining sadness is very (very, very) accurate. I also think it's important for you to have a control group or a control test for each person. For example, repeat the procedure without showing a sad video - almost as an example of what to do - and then do the same thing with a a sad video. It might also be interesting to see the effects of a happy video, and see f they are opposite. The results of these three in combination would certainly give definitive results. Finally, you should also make sure you have a questionnaire to measure person B’s mood, and a procedure by which to neutralize the emotions of this person beforehand. This will probably be the most difficult part, but it likely will be the most important as your study centers around this person’s neutrality.
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