Browsing by Author "Ylätalo, Hanna"

Objective. Empathy is essential for successful collaboration. Empathic mechanisms partly rely on receiving sensory socioemotional information during social interactions, such as facial expressions. Today, computer-mediated communication (CMC) covers a large part of daily social environments. However, socioemotional information during CMC is restricted, which directly impacts social processes and therefore, different empathic skills may become beneficial in CMC environments compared to face-to-face interactions. The impacts of CMC on social processes are insufficiently understood and studies provide mixed results. Physiological synchrony is a useful tool to study underlying aspects of social interactions. In psychophysiology, physiological states can be evaluated according to physiological responses, such as changes in electrodermal activity (EDA), which is a measure of sympathic nervous system activity. EDA synchrony is connected to empathy and collaboration in several studies. The purpose of this study is to reveal connections between empathic skills, collaborative task performance and EDA synchrony in CMC environment. Methods. EDA signals of twenty-nine pairs were recorded during collaborative task performance in VR environment. Participants were unfamiliar with each other and could not see each other during performance. Before the experiment, they conducted two empathy tests: Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME). The performance was measured and connected with empathic abilities using statistical methods. EDA synchrony indices were calculated for each pair, and were statistically connected with empathy and task performance. Results and Conclusions. The results surprisingly showed that IRI subscale ’personal distress’ predicts collaborative task performance in VR environment. Personal distress reflects emotional sensitivity and is conneceted to social avoidance and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. This result indicates that different social skills become beneficial in CMC environment, where participants cannot see each other, as in face- to-face collaboration. In addition, RME, which reflect skills in complex emotion recognition, was connected to performance on a trend level, which is supported by previous findings. EDA synchrony occured, but was not connected with either empathic skills or collaboration.