Media Naturalness, Emotion Contagion, and Creativity: A Laboratory Experiment Among Dyads

Workplaces have evolved to rely on digital media for collaboration. Previous research has demonstrated how different characteristics of these tools, such as richness and naturalness, can enable and constrain communication among online teams. However, the role of affect in these collaborations, and the degree to which teams are able to communicate affective information, remains less clear. This research-in-progress presents a laboratory experiment that compared creative task performance under two conditions (i) dyads were online or in-person (ii) dyads began with similar or different affective states.