Effects of Conversational Involvement Cues on Understanding and Emotions in Instant Messaging Conversations is a peer reviewed article that "explores how multitasking affects people’s levels of involvement or engagement in their conversations, and how levels of involvement in turn influence people’s language, understanding, and affective responses to the conversation. " It is common to use Instant Messaging such as Facebook, Instagram, email etc.; to communicate with one another while multitasking in the workplace. These conversations are often carried out with amid other tasks. This study was done to prove the effects of multitasking on the quality of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) conversation itself.”
When the employees are browsing the web and working on a document at the same time it is considered a distraction or interruption to the work related task. Technology is expanding which is making this issue way more common especially now in 2016, since almost everyone has a cell phone and access to the internet anywhere. These devices have a variety of apps that can be used to waste several minutes or even hours looking at videos, pictures and text that will delay the work that needs to be done. I am a victim of looking at my phone for hours when I could have been doing something more productive. In today’s society, we are surrounded by technology to make our lives easier but unfortunately it distracts us from important task.
Method/ Participants
The method that was used to conduct the research was a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. The research was able to use quantifying behaviors, opinions and surveys to help analyze the results. These methods provided insights into the problem and helped clarify the emotions of the participants. The participants consisted of 60 undergraduate students from an American University who participated in this study for either course credit or paid $10 compensation. The interaction in the study is measured not by communication action but by verbal interaction such as numbers of pronouns but also by responses to the questionnaire item about different aspects of the involvement. The Cognitive attention is an essential component of both the emotion and interpretation of conversation involvement. “The findings demonstrate that multitasking affects how involved people are during IM conversations. This level of involvement subsequently affects both their own and their partners’ understanding, emotions, and enjoyment of the task.”
The Research Experiment
The experiment spilt the participant in pairs to discuss a business proposal using text chat for a total of 20 minutes. The discussion task involved a business proposal for a new on-campus outlet for a popular ice-cream brand. In this scenario, the owner of the ice-cream brand, had a higher risk to open the new shop on campus. The partners will choose one of the eight choices, consider a location, cost, list five pros and cons for each location and keep in mind the type of customers. After each five minutes they would discuss two more locations and discuss the pros and cons.
The distraction task was to play a memory game while discussing the business proposal, paying equivalent attention to the game and to the conversation. The game is used to distract the participants from the conversation and so that they can measure their level of involvement when distracted. The participants could not tell their partner that they were playing the game. These task were manipulated multitasking by asking each participant for five minutes to both be highly involved, one highly distracted and the other highly involved and finally each was distracted. At the end of each five minutes the participants filled out a questionnaire to measure their level of involvement and emotions.
Data Analysis and Presentation
This study focus on conversational involvement while other studies have examined the lack of face to face involvement and its effects. The fact that this studied focus on “how multitasking affects involvement in CMC, and how the lack of conversational involvement, in turn, influences communication processes such as comprehension and emotions during a mediated conversation.” The group discovered that multitasking in an IM conversation increased perceived workload.“Therefore, the level of attention to the partner, the content of the conversation, and the interaction as a whole, all reflect a person’s level of involvement.”
Connection
This study took a unique approach by focusing on the conversations and emotions instead of the typical face to face interactions or nonverbal cues. “Conversation is central to many types of collaborative work, serving as a key strategy for both coordinating work and fostering interpersonal relationships.” In the article Effects of Conversational Involvement Cues on Understanding and Emotions in Instant Messaging Conversations was an easy read that intrigued me to want to study more on communication and emotional responses Before this article I was not aware of how a few distractions can affect your emotions and conversational involvement. Even though I enjoyed this article I truly believe that it could have been expanded in a variety of ways. I believe that there was not enough evidence to prove that the results were accurate. After reading the article I still had unanswered questions about the importance of emotions and distractions.
In the textbook Conflict Management for Mangers by Susan Raines it demonstrates how important it is to resolve conflicts at work in a variety of ways; two topics that would have been essential in this article was listening and emotional intelligence.” Expressing, acknowledging, reframing and integrating emotion can have a powerful positive force for problem solving conflict resolution and transformation, depending on how we decide to understand, approach, process and express them.” Emotions are valid and should be express but many people are taught to leave their emotions at the door in the workplace. Not being able to communicate these emotions can escalate into a negative situation that could have been avoided if they had emotional intelligence. Emotions “can be expressed in ways that are constructive or destructive, pleasurable or painful, positive or negative, distorting or clarifying, escalating, or deescalating, collaborative or adversarial, reactive or preventative.”
They should add a section in the article explaining the importance of the emotions that they expressed in the article and why it is important. In the resolving conflicts textbooks, it explains that “if tempers are high, we know that individuals and groups have difficulty processing complex information and making good decisions. At the opposite end of the spectrum if an issue is not considered important, those affected by the decision or problem will not want to get involve and contribute to its solution.” This sentence would have brought clarity to why emotions are important to the efficiency of the work.
Listening skills are the foundation for most forms of collaboration, problem solving and dispute resolution. Many people just listen to respond and then get out their view, opinion, thoughts and so on. “Listening to understand requires listeners to suspend judgments and their own need to drive the conversation. Instead of listening for the moment to jump into the conversation, the goals of listening to understand is to allow the speaker to completely share his or her thoughts, concerns, or emotions with the listener, uninterrupted.” Listening skills that would be essentials to the conversational part of the experiment even though it is online. In the article these skills could be transferred to the IM messaging as well because many of the participants was responding to just respond especially when they were distracted by the online game but if they would listen to understand they would have a more comprehensive understanding of the issue at hand.
Conclusion
The article Effects of Conversational Involvement Cues on Understanding and Emotions in Instant Messaging Conversations “explores how multitasking affects people’s levels of involvement or engagement in their conversations, and how levels of involvement in turn influence people’s language, understanding, and affective responses to the conversation. " Before this article I was not aware of how a few distractions can affect your emotions and conversational involvement. I love the unique approach of focusing on conversational and emotions instead of face to face communication. Even though I enjoyed this article I truly believe there was not enough evidence to prove that the results were accurate and that they should have included listening skills and emotional intelligence.
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