(Non)cooperative Dialogues: The Role of Emotions

Objective: The effect of emotion on (non) cooperation in unscripted, ecological communication is investigated. Background: The participants in an interaction are generally cooperative in that, for instance, they tend to reduce the chance of misunderstandings in communication. However, it is also clear that cooperation is not complete. Positive and negative emotional states also appear to be connected to the participants' commitment to cooperate or not, respectively. So far, however, it has proven remarkably difficult to test this because of the lack of entirely objective measurements of both cooperation levels and emotional responses. Method: In this article, the authors present behavioral methods and coding schemes for analyzing cooperation and (surface) indicators of emotions in face-to-face interactions and show that they can be used to study the correlation between emotions and cooperation effectively. Results: The authors observed large negative correlations between heart rate and cooperation, and a group of facial expressions was found to be predictive of the level of cooperation of the speakers. Conclusion: It is possible to develop reliable methods to code for cooperation, and with such coding schemes it is possible to confirm the commonsense prediction that noncooperative behavior by a conversational participant affects the other participant in ways that can be measured quantitatively. Application: These results shed light on an aspect of interaction that is crucial to building adaptive systems able to measure cooperation and to respond to the user's affective states. The authors expect their methods to be applicable to building and testing such interaction systems.