Technology-mediated communication affords great advantages such as surpassing the need to be physically co-located and enabling anonymity, but depending on the medium the verbal and nonverbal cues we rely on to convey our own and understand others’ thoughts and feelings are limited or altogether absent. How might we keep the advantages of technology-mediated communication and lessen this drawback?
Building on existing research in social biosensing, this project seeks to explore the effects of sharing physiological data in communication on interpersonal processes like empathy. In this first study we observe that embedding their electrodermal activity (EDA) in a video of an anonymous person’s experience lowers observers’ accuracies of the person’s feelings, but functions similarly to narrative text as a reminder of the person’s presence and unique perspective. Future work will continue to explore these effects with broader interpretations of empathy and in different relationship types.
PUBLICATIONS
Max T. Curran, Jeremy Raboff Gordon, Lily Lin, Priyashri Kamlesh Sridhar, and John Chuang. 2019. Understanding Digitally-Mediated Empathy: An Exploration of Visual, Narrative, and Biosensory Informational Cues. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019). (forthcoming) [PDF]