Feedback is information that can improve task performance. Online communities, educational forums, and crowd-based feedback platforms all support feedback exchange among a more diverse set of sources than ever before, with greater control over how to moderate this exchange. In this work, we study how the power relationship between the source and receiver and the tone of language influence the recep-tivity, effort, and work performance resulting from online feedback exchange. We conducted an online experiment manipulating affective language and source of feedback on a writing task. We found that critiques with positive affec-tive language increased positive emotions and reduced participants' annoyance and frustration, which led to an increase in work quality, compared to critiques without positive language. Feedback without positive affective language led to more edits, but not better work outcomes. Participants reacted more positively to feedback from an anonymous source than from a peer or an authority. Our findings provide design implications for platforms to support more fruitful feedback exchange.

Striking up a good conversation with new acquaintances is often a difficult problem. In this paper we report on the perceptions of wearable device users who were given real-time personalized topic suggestions during a conversation with a person they just met. Suggestions were generated using a ranking recommendation algorithm, and were delivered via Google Glasses. We conducted a study with 38 pairs of strangers, who received such suggestions while conversing for the first time. Participants found the suggestions to be helpful, but only at the right moments, and for certain types of speakers. Our results contribute to the understanding of how communication interventions influence people's experience and behaviors, and enhance interpersonal interactions. Our study also presents design implications for applications on wearable devices to facilitate conversations between strangers.

Increasingly, the advice people receive on the Internet is socially transparent in the sense that it displays contextual information about the advice-givers or their actions. We hypothesize that activity transparency -seeing an advice giver's process while creating his or her recommendations - will increase advice taking. We report three experiments testing the effect of activity transparency on taking mediocre advice. We found that the presence of a web history increased the likelihood of following a financial advisor's advice and reduced participant earnings (Exp. 1), especially when the web history implied greater task focus (Exp. 2, 3). CSCW research usually emphasizes how to increase information sharing; this work suggests when shared information may be inappropriate. We suggest ways to counter activity transparency's potential downsides.

In this paper we explore how and why communication problems such as lack of understanding, low involvement, and negative emotions emerged during the computer-mediated conversations of same-culture and cross-culture pairs. We used retrospective analysis, in which pairs of cross-culture and same-culture American and Chinese participants collaborated on a crime-solving task via Instant Messaging (IM), and later reviewed their IM conversations to report their thoughts and feelings on a minute-by-minute basis. We found differences in the types of messages people produced based on the cultural combination of the pairs. We also found that the content of their partner's messages influenced participants' involvement and negative emotions during the conversation. Our results provide insights into the conversational processes of computer-mediated intercultural teams, and have implications for the design of intercultural collaboration tools.

Research has shown that intercultural communication can be more problematic than same-culture communication. In this study we use a technique called retrospective analysis in order to examine these problems in greater detail. American and Chinese participants discussed a crime story with either an American or a Chinese partner using Instant Messaging (IM). After the session, each participant reviewed the IM conversation in two-minute segments and rated it on several dimensions. Chinese participants reported significantly more problems than American participants, and partner culture affected all participants' feelings of annoyance. An analysis of the communication problems participants reported showed four themes: mismatched communication styles, differences in conversational focus, relationship-building issues, and problems with the IM medium. The results show how differences in communication styles can affect intercultural conversations and provide design suggestions for new tools to improve intercultural collaboration.

For many first-year college students in their late teen years, communicating with parents provides crucial social support. When going to college involves moving away from home for the first time, students and their parents must rely on technologies to keep communication channels open. We studied the ways in which college freshmen communicate with their parents and the various communication technologies they use. Interviews with nineteen first-year students at a major United States university revealed insights into students' perspectives of their communication and relationships with parents. We found students to use a variety of tools to connect with their parents and identified some considerations they make when choosing tools. Furthermore, the use of these communication tools played a significant role in mediating students' social and emotional closeness with, and independence from, their parents. We conclude by discussing technical and social implications for social support of students and student-parent relationships.