Hi Jerry! This study is super interesting! I am very interested to know how people feel about sharing personal stories/information over a screen and how that distance puts a strain on relationship development in a workplace setting. I know for me personally, in some instance, the safety and comfort of being at home allows for more personal sharing, whereas in other cases, the screen creates a barrier to forming connections. 

Jerry, 

Really glad to see you doing work through PURM this summer! I just wanted to ask a quick question about the sentence conditions that you and Norman generated to gauge peoples' responses to the conditions of personal emotive expressions. First of all, I was wondering how you guys decided which words were more "neutral" versus "affective?" For instance, what kinds of emotions and feelings were you aiming for within the responses, and how did you decide upon the words for such effects? 

Again, good job! 

Junyoung

Hi Jerry, this is a super cool and relevant project! I'm curious as to whether an audio recording of a person's voice saying the sentence rather than seeing it in text would increase feelings of connectivity. 

Hi Junyoung,

Its great hearing from you and thank you for taking the time to learn more about interconnectedness! With regards to your question, we had a 2 step process of doing so: We differentitated between the neutral sentences and affective sentences through the adjectives and syntax used. For example, neutral sentences would be direct and state external information without revealing much about personal emotions, desires, etc. We also used the Wissel dictionary which compiled connotations of affectiveness from individuals surveyed to have an aggregate number representing how affective or objective words are. 

We varied the adjectives we used, and refered to colloqially used phrases such as "passionate", "compelled" and "driven" that are commonly used to talk about achievement in these contexts. 

Great questions, and I believe very pertient to your work in natural language processing as well!

Jerry Cai

Hi Audrey,

Thank you for taking time to learn more about this project and that is a great question. In terms of distance and its affect in workplace relations, we hypothesize exactly what you have mentioned, that in real life contexts, revealing more personal information does create a higher degree of interpersonal connection due to humans being able to contextualize speech with their associated emotes and expressions. That is very interesting that you bring up that being in a home environment would also make people more comfortable, and I would like to also look further into how environment affects perceived interconnectedness.

Please let me know if you have any more questions!

Jerry 

Hi Sarah,

Thank you for the question! Actually, yes, like you said, the original experiment was supposed to be face to face and we were expecting that and audio recording of a person's message would improve connectedness, as this is the most natural medium of communication. However, our study also wanted to look at whether adding affective wording into profiles such as Linkedin or resumes would allow for an indirect connection between colleagues and/or hiring managers. I do think spoken messages recorded real time with facial expressions would have the most affect, but it was interesting to see what effect messages presented in this format would look like!

Thank you!

Jerry