Their heart rate, skin conductance, and temperature were measured during the task. A confederate at given time points interrupted the task and gave negative feedback on their task performance. The aim was to elicit negative emotions such as anger and/or frustration. In the emotion elicitation condition, the Follower or the Giver can alternatively be a confederate, aiming to anger the other participant. Before the task, we recorded the psycho-physiological baseline of each participant for five minutes. Then we recorded the first 3 min of the psycho-physiological outputs from the beginning of the task, which we called task condition. Here the speaker was not challenged by the confederate. After that, the confederate (the same person in all the interactions) performed uncooperative utterances in carefully controlled circumstances by acting negative emotion elicitation lines at minutes 4, 9 and 14 of the interaction.
The following lines were given by the confederate when acting the Follower role:
– You are sending me in the wrong direction; try to be more accurate!;
– It’s still wrong. You are not doing your best. Try harder! Again, from where you stopped;
– You’re obviously not good enough at giving instructions.
A control group was also recorded while playing the Map Task with the same maps but without confederate.
Eye contact, communicative role (Giver and Follower) and gender (male or female) were counterbalanced.