Smile! Studying Expressivity of Happiness as a Synergic Factor in Collaborative Information Seeking

摘要

It is commonly expected that collaborative work will leadto better results than working individually. It has beendemonstrated by some that teamwork is more than addingtogether the product of individual work, though this maydepend on various factors such as time, space, the tasks oractivities nature, as well as team members’ personalities.To date, little is known about the specific elements thatcontribute to this synergic effect; however, some haveargued that emotions, in particular positive ones, may havea fundamental role in teamwork. In this paper we take acloser look at users’ smiles - as a way of expressinghappiness- by studying how they participate in theinformation search process of both individuals and teams.We present a user study involving 30 participants (10 pairsand 10 individuals) and show how smiling contributes tothe overall experience of team members as well as theirperformance in an exploratory search task with respect toindividual seekers. Our results indicate that smiling issignificantly more prominent in participants workingtogether synchronously than those working individually andthat smiling may contribute to particular dimensions ofinformation coverage.