Modeling the Interplay Between Cohesion Dimensions: a Challenge for Group Affective Emergent States

Emergent states are temporal group phenomena that arise from collective affective, behavioral, and cognitive processes shared among the group’s members during their interactions. Cohesion is one such state, mainly conceptualized by scholars as affective in nature, and frequently distinguished into the two dimensions social and task cohesion. Whereas social cohesion is related to the need of belonging to a group, task cohesion is related to the group’s goals and tasks. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of behavioral interaction dynamics to predict cohesion’s dynamics. Drawing from Social Science insights, we investigate the interplay between social and task cohesion to predict their dynamics across group tasks from nonverbal behavioral features. Three computational architectures exploiting transfer learning are presented. Transfer learning capitalizes on information learnt by a model for a specific dimension to predict the dynamics of the other dimension. Results show that integrating the influence of social cohesion to predict dynamics of task cohesion outperforms state-of-the-art. To predict dynamics of social cohesion, a model integrating the reciprocal impact of social and task cohesion significantly improves performance with respect to the state-of-the-art and a model only integrating the impact of task cohesion on dynamics of social cohesion.