Affective Process in Multi-User Interaction and Trust in Shared Technology

The purpose of this dissertation research was to understand affect in team interactions and to investigate the effect of affective process on the individuals' trust in technology. Specifically, this research studied two-person teams that consisted of an active user and a passive user of a shared technology in a psychomotor multi-tasking environment. Efforts have been made in previous research to understand affect in teams and the effect of affect in technology use. However, little research dedicated to explore the relationship between affect and trust in technology in team context. This dissertation research consisted of two studies. The first study aimed to understand dynamics of integral affect in teams and the second study aimed to understand the effects of incidental affect and integral affect on trust in technology. In both studies, participants worked as two-person teams and multi-tasked under varied technology reliability and task difficulty levels. Participants' integral affect was measured by facial expression recognition analysis of videotaped data. In the first study, it was found that individuals worked in a same team had similar level of positive affect. Analysis performed using actor-partner interdependence model indicated that the two individuals worked in a same team influenced each other from a moment-to-moment basis. Task/technological conditions and level of training of the passive user influenced how the two users influenced each other. In the second study, it was found that integral affect mediated the effects of incidental affect and task/technological conditions on trust in technology. However, the main effect of incidental affect on trust in technology was not significant. These findings provided insights into the affective process of team interactions with shared technology, revealed the role of affect in the mechanism of trust formation and calibration process, and had important implications for system design. In addition, the methods used in this study for modeling integral affect could be useful for future efforts in investigating emotional contagion and affect dynamics in teams.