English

An Exploration of Internal States in Collaborative Problem Solving

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-07-04 v1

Abstract

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a complex cognitive, social, and emotional process that is increasingly prevalent in educational and professional settings. This study investigates the emotional states of individuals during CPS using a mixed-methods approach. Teams of four first completed a novel CPS task. Immediately after, each individual was placed in an isolated room where they reviewed the video of their group performing the task and self-reported their internal experiences throughout the task. We performed a linguistic analysis of these internal monologues, providing insights into the range of emotions individuals experience during CPS. Our analysis showed distinct patterns in language use, including characteristic unigrams and bigrams, key words and phrases, emotion labels, and semantic similarity between emotion-related words.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.02229,
  title  = {An Exploration of Internal States in Collaborative Problem Solving},
  author = {Sifatul Anindho and Videep Venkatesha and Mariah Bradford and Anne M. Cleary and Nathaniel Blanchard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.02229},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII) 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:44:09.968Z