Influencing laughter with AI-mediated communication
Previous experimental findings support the hypothesis that laughter and positive emotions are contagious in
face-to-face and mediated communication. To test this hypothesis, we describe four experiments in which participants communicate
via a chat tool that artificially adds or removes laughter (e.g. haha or lol), without
participants being aware of the manipulation. We found no evidence to support the contagion hypothesis. However, artificially
exposing participants to more lols decreased participants’ use of hahas but led to more
involvement and improved task-performance. Similarly, artificially exposing participants to more hahas decreased
use of haha but increased lexical alignment. We conclude that, even though the interventions have effects on
coordination, they are incompatible with contagion as a primary explanatory mechanism. Instead, these results point to an
interpretation that involves a more sophisticated view of dialogue mechanisms along the lines of Conversational Analysis and
similar frameworks and we suggest directions for future research.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Laughter and emotional contagion
- Laughter in face-to-face interaction
- Interactive negotiation of laughter
- Emotional contagion in text-based mediated chat
- Laughter in text-mediated communication
- 3.Research questions
- 4.Experiment 1: Inserting artificial haha
- Methods
- Participants
- The collaborative reference task
- Experimental manipulation: Inserting haha
- Measures
- Laughter
- Happy emojis
- Sentiment score
- Task performance
- Number of characters
- Lexical alignment
- Position of laughter
- Next laughter
- Hypotheses
- Analysis
- Results
- Haha
- Happy emojis
- Task performance
- Number of characters
- Sentiment analysis
- Alignment
- Producer of next haha
- Discussion
- 5.Experiment 2: Inserting fewer hahas and lols
- Methods
- Hypotheses
- Results
- Haha
- Lol
- Happy emojis
- Task performance
- Number of characters
- Sentiment analysis
- Alignment
- Producer of next haha
- Producer of next lol
- Discussion
- 6.Experiment 3: Inserting laughter in next turn
- Methods
- The balloon task
- Manipulation: Inserting haha
- Hypotheses
- Data analysis
- Results
- Hahas
- Lol
- Happy emojis
- Number of characters
- Sentiment analysis
- Alignment
- Producer of next haha
- Discussion
- 7.Experiment 4: Removing haha
- Methods
- Manipulation
- Hypotheses
- Analysis
- Results
- Hahas
- Lols
- Happy emojis
- Number of characters
- Sentiment analysis
- Alignment
- Discussion
- 8.General discussion
- 9.Conclusions and future work
- Notes
-
References