What Makes Teamwork Work? A Multimodal Case Study on Emotions and Diagnostic Expertise in an Intelligent Tutoring System

Teamwork is pivotal in medical teamwork when professionals with diverse skills and emotional states collaborate to make critical decisions. This case study examines the interplay between emotions and professional skills in group decision-making during collaborative medical diagnosis within an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). By comparing verbal and physiological data between high-performing and low-performing teams of medical professionals working on a patient case within the ITS, alongside individuals' retrospective collaboration experiences, we employ multimodal data analysis to identify patterns in team emotional climate and their impact on diagnostic efficiency. Specifically, we investigate how emotion-driven dialogue and professional expertise influence both the information-seeking process and the final diagnostic decisions. Grounded in the socially shared regulation of learning framework and utilizing sentiment analysis, we found that social-motivational interactions are key drivers of a positive team emotional climate. Furthermore, through content analysis of dialogue and physiological signals to pinpoint emotional fluctuations, we identify episodes where knowledge exchange and skill acquisition are most likely to occur. Our findings offer valuable insights into optimizing group collaboration in medical contexts by harmonizing emotional dynamics with adaptive strategies for effective decision-making, ultimately enhancing diagnostic accuracy and teamwork effectiveness.