Bridging the gap between emotion and joint action

Our daily human life is filled with a myriad of joint action moments, be it children playing, adults working together (i.e., team sports), or strangers navigating through a crowd. Joint action brings individuals (and embodiment of their emotions) together, in space and in time. Yet little is known about how individual emotions propagate through embodied presence in a group, and how joint action changes individual emotion. In fact, the multi-agent component is largely missing from neuroscience-based approaches to emotion, and reversely joint action research has not found a way yet to include emotion as one of the key parameters to model socio-motor interaction. In this review, we first identify the gap and then stockpile evidence showing strong entanglement between emotion and acting together from various branches of sciences. We propose an integrative approach to bridge the gap, highlight five research avenues to do so in behavioral neuroscience and digital sciences, and address some of the key challenges in the area faced by modern societies

Leading Through an “Emotional Roller Coaster”: The Centrality of Emotion Management in Achieving Sustainable Innovation : A Qualitative Case Study from the Norwegian energy sector

Organizations are increasingly expected to engage in sustainable innovation to remain competitive, and leadership is essential to this process. Specifically, there is a great need for sustainable innovations in the energy sector as it is currently considered fundamentally unsustainable. Due to the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous nature of the innovation process, leadership is likely to differ from other leadership situations, in that a pivotal function of leadership appears to involve managing emotions during the innovation process. Yet, how multiple innovation leaders engage in emotion management to maintain committed to achieve sustainable innovation represents a nascent field. Thus, we investigate how leaders manage emotions during critical phases of the innovation process to foster commitment to the achievement of sustainable innovations. We conduct an explorative multiple case study, interviewing leaders in four small-to-mediumsized companies in the Norwegian energy sector. Our qualitative analysis first reveals that leadership involves experiencing sudden shifts in emotions that become particularly salient in three distinct transition phases during the innovation management process. Second, the innovation leaders use a set of specific emotion regulation strategies to navigate the “emotional roller coaster” of the innovation process toward a future desirable goal. Finally, overall, innovation leaders manage their own and others’ emotions, based on an overarching hopeful metaemotion driven by their commitment to the achievement of sustainable innovation. Through this study, we contribute to the management innovation literature by illuminating how, surprisingly, despite experiencing the innovation phases as an “emotional roller coaster”, leaders manage these emotions overall through an overarching metaemotion. In conjunction with specific emotion regulation strategies, which we also identified that the leaders applied during critical phases of the innovation management process, we specifically find that the metaemotion allows innovation leaders to stay committed to the achievement of sustainable innovation.nhhma

Fuzzy Computational Model for Emotion Regulation Based on Affect Control Theory

Emotion modeling is a multi-disciplinary problem that has managed to attract a great deal of research work spanned to a wide spectrum of scholarly areas starting at humanistic science fields passing through applied sciences and engineering and arriving at health care and wellbeing. Emotion research under the umbrella of IT and Computer Science was extensively successful with a handful of achievements especially in the last two decades. Affective Computing is an IT originated systematic research area that strives to best model emotions in a way that fits the needs for computer applications enriched with affective component. A comprehensive Affective Computing based system is made of three major components: a component for emotion detection, a component for emotion modeling, and finally a component to generating affective responses in artificial agents. The major focus of this dissertation is on developing efficient computational models for emotions. In fact most of the research works presented in this dissertation were focused on a sub problem of emotion modeling known as emotion regulation at which we strive to model the dynamics of changes in the emotional response levels of individuals as a result of the overt or covert situational changes. In this dissertation, several emotion related problems were addressed. Modeling the dynamics for emotion elicitation from a pure appraisal approach, investigating individualistic differences in emotional processes, and modeling emotion contagion as a type of social contagion phenomena are a few to name from those conducted research works. The main contribution of this dissertation was to propose a new computational model for the problem of emotion regulation that is based on Affect Control Theory. The new approach utilized a hybrid appraisal-dimensional architecture. By using a fuzzy modeling approach, the natural fuzziness in perceiving, representing and expressing emotions was effectively and efficiently addressed. Furthermore, the combination of automata framework with the concept of bipolar emotional channels used at the heart of the modeling processes of the proposed model has further contributed to promote the behavior of the model in order to exhibit an accepted degree of human-like affective behavior

Explaining Implicit and Explicit Affective Linkages in IT Teams: Facial Recognition, Emotional Intelligence, and Affective Tone

Over 80 percent of task work in organizations is performed by teams. Most teams operate in a more fluid, dynamic, and complex environment than in the past. As a result, a growing body of research is beginning to focus on how teams’ emotional well-being can benefit the effectiveness of workplace team efforts. These teams are required to be adaptive, to operate in ill-structured environments, and to rely on technology more than ever before. However, teams have become so ubiquitous that many organizations and managers take them for granted and assume they will be effective and productive. Because of the increased use of team work and the lack of sufficient organizational and managerial sufficient best practices for teams, more research is required. Team Emotional Intelligence (TEI) is a collective skill that has been shown to benefit team performance. However, measures for TEI are relatively new and have not been widely studied. Results show TEI is a viable skill that affects performance in IT teams. In technology-rich environments, the teams’ coordination can vary on levels of the expertise needed when TEI behaviors are employed. Cooperative norms play an important role in team interactions and influence TEI. Physiological measures of team emotional contagion and TEI, as well as psychometric measures of team affective tone results show causal affective linkages in the emotional convergence model. These results suggest that combined physiological and psychometric measures of team emotion behavior provide explanatory power for these linkages in teams during IS technology system use. These findings offer new insights into the emotional states of IS teams that may advance the understanding team behaviors for improved performance outcomes and contribute to the NeuroIS literature

Emerging Trends in and Strategies for Industry 4.0 During and Beyond Covid-19

“Emerging Trends in and Strategies for Industry 4.0 During and Beyond Covid-19” is an all-encompassing scholarly referenced book which is comprised of original and previously unpublished research articles and chapters that would provide cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research and expert insights on advancing technologies and new strategies being used in businesses settings as well as for administrative and leadership roles in organizations during and beyond Covid-19 in perspective of Industry 4.0. The goal of this volume is to provide an overview of how Covid-19 businesses settings as well as for administrative and leadership roles in organizations studies. The Covid-19 outbreak has given an unprecedented shock to the global economy. It has also laid bare the vulnerabilities of many practices that had overtime become defining and sacrosanct features of our economic systems. In particular, business management and administrative have come under scrutiny as different production facilities are closed down, demand patterns shifted, and mobility of goods came to a virtual halt. Concerns have been noted about overreliance on firms to meet even the most basics of our needs. Disruptions caused by the Covid-19 outbreak to supply needs of customers have inflicted immense hardships upon firms and communities globally. It is incumbent upon management scholars to reflect upon this distressful situation, develop knowledge and devise strategies to help overcome the crisis. The world was already moving towards industry 4.0, but the global pandemic of Covid-19 has really rushed the things up. In different aspects of life in general and business in particular, optimized computerization, digitalization and artificial intelligence are being used with never seen- before speed and impact. It has brought with it unique challenges and opportunities. This book looks into the challenges and business opportunities in industry 4.0, trends it is setting, and research and strategies for its successful implementation. Covering a wide range of topics including community engagement, human resource management, data management, economy, R&D, communication, agile production, organizational behaviours and mobile learning, this publication provides insights into technological advancements with business administrative applications and examines forthcoming implementation strategies

Social influences on affective responses to negative experiences

As social human beings, the way we emotionally respond to what happens around us is often regulated by our interactions with others. The overall aim of this thesis is to advance the understanding of how social influences surrounding negative experiences can affect the formation, regulation and transfer of affective responses. Throughout four studies, we examined the impact of different kinds of social influences (face-to-face and online) surrounding various negative experiences (experimental analogues for trauma experiences), and how these social influences impact affective responses (from self-reported measures to physiological responses). In Study I, dyads of participants underwent a vicarious threat conditioning paradigm to investigate whether physiological synchrony between them during learning predicted the strength of observationally acquired conditioned responses and examine the potential role of trait empathy. As predicted, increased physiological synchronization during learning led to a stronger CS differentiation during the test phase, but unlike our predictions, self-reported empathy was not found to be related to physiological coupling. These findings support the role of social influences in the formation of affective responses and indicate that the physiological synchrony captured here may be more related to experience sharing rather than individuals’ tendency to empathize with others. Study II tested whether threat conditioning generated persistent intrusive memories of neutral stimuli, and whether different social support interactions after threat acquisition modulated the expression of emotional memories, as measured by skin-conductance responses and number of intrusive memories. Social support interactions consisted of two social support conditions (supportive social interaction versus unsupportive social interaction) and a control group (no social interaction). Our results indicated that threat conditioning generated intrusive memories, with greater number of intrusions of CS+ than CS- and these intrusive memories were still measurable one year later, especially for individuals with higher trait anxiety and a greater number of previous trauma experiences. Our findings support the literature indicating the contribution of associative processes in the formation of intrusive memories and demonstrate the advantage of adding the measure of intrusive memories to a standard Pavlovian threat conditioning paradigm for investigating short and long term intrusive memories. Finally, these findings suggest that the specific the support interactions used in this study might not modulate the processes underlying memory consolidation and call attention to the difficulty of operationalizing social support interactions in an experimental context. Study III is composed of two online sub-studies investigating the social transmission of threat and safety evaluations. In sub-study 1, we combined behavioral and computational modeling approaches to estimate the influence of others’ online evaluations of negative pictures on participant’s own evaluations. In sub-study 2, we replicated these findings and further demonstrated that others’ evaluations led participants to shift their affective response to these pictures. Interestingly, seeing that others evaluate pictures as safe resulted in individuals feeling less distressed towards these pictures, suggesting that the observation of social safety cues online could attenuate the spread of negative emotions. Our findings offer a mechanism for how people integrate their own and others’ experiences when exposed to emotional content online. Furthermore, knowing how threat and safety information propagate online and its impact on people’s wellbeing could be an important tool to prevent the impact of the spread of threatening information online. Study IV asked whether using the trauma film paradigm in an online setting could induce similar emotional responses as in-lab experiments. We also tested whether reading previous participants’ appraisals after watching the trauma film modulated participants’ emotional responses, as measured by changes in negative mood and number of intrusive memories during the subsequent seven days. The trauma film online replicated previous in-lab results, although with a somewhat lower mean number of intrusive memories. Our results indicated that reading positive comments after watching the film decreased negative mood, compared to reading negative comments or no comments. Reading others’ appraisal did not modulate the number of intrusive memories. These results demonstrate that the digital version of the trauma film paradigm can be used as an experimental analogue for exposure to aversive content online and enables the experimental investigation of how such content impacts mental health. Moreover, our findings indicate an improvement of mood following the exposure to negative visual content through positive social reappraisal, paving the way towards this goal. These four studies demonstrate that vast range of ways in which social interactions influence affective responses, from verbal to non-verbal exchanges in both face-to-face and online settings. Our work also illustrates the complexity of experimentally investigating social influences and the specific processes involved