Habits of the Heart(rate)

Abstract

We investigate interpretations of a biosignal (heartrate) in uncertain social interactions. We describe the quantitative and qualitative results of a randomized vignette experiment in which subjects were asked to make assessments about an acquaintance based on an imagined scenario that included shared heartrate information. We compare the results of this experiment in adversarial and non-adversarial contexts of interaction. We find that elevated heartrate transmits cues about mood in both contexts, but that these cues do not appear to impact assessments of trustworthiness, reliability and dependability. Counter to our expectations, we find that normal (rather than elevated) heartrate leads to negative trust-related assessments, but only in an adversarial context. Our qualitative analysis points to the role of social expectations in shaping contextual interpretations of heartrate, and reveals individual differences in the way interpretations are constructed. We unpack some of the ways that social meanings can arise from biosensor data, and discuss considerations for those designing interactions with wearables.

The Effect of Expressive Biosignals on Empathy and Closeness for a Stigmatized Group Member

“…In order to manipulate the presence of biosignal information we included two biosignal information conditions, one with (HR Graph) and one without a visual (HR Caption). Heart rate information is known to be ambiguous and can be interpreted in various ways [53]. In fact, in our preliminary pilots, many participants cited withdrawal as a cause for the changes in Jared's heart rate.…”

Heart Rate Sharing at the Workplace

“…Nevertheless, people seem to attribute emotional information to heart rate data, including information about the subject's emotional valence. One study found that in uncertain social situations, elevated heart rate was perceived to be related to negative mood [6]. Surprisingly, the same study found that normal, but not elevated, heart rate influenced trustworthiness negatively in an adversarial condition.…”

“…Heart-rate sharing has been proposed as a way to provide implicit emotional information in CMC [3,4,[6][7][8][9][10][11]. Furthermore, other types of physiological data have been explored previously, for example brain waves [34], skin conductance [5,35] and synchronization of biosignals [36].…”

“…It can be expected that the positive or negative performance effects of augmenting interpersonal communication with physiological cues depend to a great extent on the communication medium, the characteristics of the task at hand, on the group performing the task, and especially the way the information is presented. Depending on the application, heart rate sharing has been implemented in various ways, for example presenting the heart rate as a pulsating animation [8], as sound [3], as a graph [9], simply as a number [8,9], or relative to a neutral level [6,7]. There are two mechanisms through which heart rate sharing can potentially have an impact on collaborative task performance.…”

“…The underlying assumption is that availability of unintentional communication cues in CMC would support social perceptiveness and improve understanding between individuals. Increased availability of real-time physiological monitoring devices has seen a rise in these kinds of explorations, and especially heart rate sharing has been a popular topic in previous research [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. As it is an emerging technology, there is still limited knowledge about heart rate sharing within real working environments, among strangers and during online text-based interaction, but at the same time, it is already practically feasible in certain real-life situations due to recent advancements in the availability of affordable and lightweight monitoring devices.…”