Abstract

It is commonly expected that collaborative work will lead to better results than working individually. It has been demonstrated by some that teamwork is more than adding together the product of individual work, though this may depend on various factors such as time, space, the tasks or activities nature, as well as team members' personalities. To date, little is known about the specific elements that contribute to this synergic effect; however, some have argued that emotions, in particular positive ones, may have a fundamental role in teamwork. In this paper we take a closer look at users' smiles - as a way of expressing happiness-by studying how they participate in the information search process of both individuals and teams. We present a user study involving 30 participants (10 pairs and 10 individuals) and show how smiling contributes to the overall experience of team members as well as their performance in an exploratory search task with respect to individual seekers. Our results indicate that smiling is significantly more prominent in participants working together synchronously than those working individually and that smiling may contribute to particular dimensions of information coverage.