The importance of emotion to group outcomes in FtF highlights the need to understand emotion contagion in distributed groups. The present study examines the transfer of negative emotion in online groups. Negative emotion was induced in one of three group members completing a task in CMC. The data suggest that emotion contagion took place at the group level, with partners experiencing more negative emotion, more disagreement, higher verbosity, and use of more complex language in induced groups compared to control groups. Induced groups also performed better on the group task, raising questions about the effects of negative emotion contagion in online groups.

Managing one's availability for interaction with others is an increasingly complex act, involving multiple media and the sharing of many types of information. In this paper we draw on a field study of 183 SMS users to introduce the idea of the "interpersonal awareness narrative" -- the coherent, plausible and sometimes deceptive stories that people tell each other about their availability and activities. We examine participants' use of deception in these accounts, and focus in particular on "butler lies," those lies told to enter or exit conversations or to arrange other interactions. We argue that participants use this type of deception in SMS strategically, drawing on the inherent ambiguities of SMS while maintaining plausible narratives.

Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its"always-on properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the "butler lie to describe lies that allow for polite initiation and termination of conversations. We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.