Physiological Synchronization and Subjective Workload in a Competitive Emergency Response Task

Human dyads and larger teams tend to acquire synchronized movements and autonomic arousal levels while working together or simply socializing. The synchronization of arousal patterns is of theoretical interest for group dynamics because they may add predictive value to the dynamics of group cohesion and team performance. This study examined the four-way relationship among experimental conditions: team size, task difficulty, time pressure (between-subjects) and subsequent experimental sessions (within-subjects). Previously, we have shown these conditions affect subjective ratings of workload that come from individual and group-level sources, synchronization of arousal, and team performance. In an experiment involving an emergency response (ER) simulation, 360 undergraduates, who were wearing electrodermal sensors, were organized into 44 teams of various sizes. Workload was experimentally varied by team size (three, four, seven or eight members), number of opponents (one or two), and time pressure; the latter was introduced sooner or later across two experimental sessions. Results showed that the experimental conditions affected synchronization levels, either at the beginning of a session or in the middle; synchronization and experimental conditions were not directly related to team performance. Subjective group workload ratings of the coordination demand of the task correlated with synchronization at the beginning of a session while team satisfaction was correlated with greater synchrony at the end of a session. The competitive nature of the ER task, as compared to strictly cooperative tasks, could be responsible for the complexity of these empirical relationships.