Watanabe Jun-Ichiro, Atsumori Hirokazu, Kiguchi Masashi
Research and Development Group, Hitachi, Ltd. Tokyo, Japan.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2016 May 3;10:194. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00194. eCollection 2016.
Recent progress with wearable sensors has enabled researchers to capture face-to-face interactions quantitatively and given great insight into human dynamics. One attractive field for applying such sensors is the workplace, where the relationship between the face-to-face behaviors of employees and the productivity of the organization has been investigated. One interesting result of previous studies showed that informal face-to-face interaction among employees, captured by wearable sensors that the employees wore, significantly affects their performance. However, the mechanism behind this relationship has not yet been adequately explained, though experiences at the job scene might qualitatively support the finding. We hypothesized that informal face-to-face interaction improves mood state, which in turn affects the task performance. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the change of mood state before and after break time for two groups of participants, one that spent their breaks alone and one that spent them with other participants, by administering questionnaires and taking brain activity measurements. Recent neuroimaging studies have suggested a significant relationship between mood state and brain activity. Here, we show that face-to-face interaction during breaks significantly improved mood state, which was measured by Profiles of Mood States (POMS). We also observed that the verbal working memory (WM) task performance of participants who did not have face-to-face interaction during breaks decreased significantly. In this paper, we discuss how the change of mood state was evidenced in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity accompanied by WM tasks measured by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).
可穿戴传感器的最新进展使研究人员能够定量捕捉面对面互动，并深入了解人类动态。应用此类传感器的一个有吸引力的领域是工作场所，在那里研究了员工的面对面行为与组织生产力之间的关系。先前研究的一个有趣结果表明，员工佩戴的可穿戴传感器捕捉到的员工之间的非正式面对面互动会显著影响他们的绩效。然而，尽管工作场景中的经验可能在定性上支持这一发现，但这种关系背后的机制尚未得到充分解释。我们假设非正式面对面互动会改善情绪状态，进而影响任务绩效。为了验证这一假设，我们通过发放问卷和测量大脑活动，评估了两组参与者在休息前后的情绪状态变化，一组参与者独自休息，另一组与其他参与者一起休息。最近的神经影像学研究表明情绪状态与大脑活动之间存在显著关系。在此，我们表明休息期间的面对面互动显著改善了情绪状态，这是通过情绪状态剖面图（POMS）测量的。我们还观察到，休息期间没有进行面对面互动的参与者的言语工作记忆（WM）任务表现显著下降。在本文中，我们讨论了如何通过近红外光谱（NIRS）测量的与WM任务相关的前额叶皮层（PFC）活动来证明情绪状态的变化。
