The relationship between stress and conflict handling style in an ODR environment

Abstract

Up until now, most approaches to Online Dispute Resolution focused on "traditional" problems such as the generation of solutions, the support to negotiation or the definition of strategies. Although these problems are evidently valid and important ones, research should also start to consider new potential issues that arise from technological evolution. In this paper we analyse the new challenges that emerge from resolving conflicts over telecommunications, namely in what concerns the lack of contextual information about parties. Specifically we build on a previous approach to stress estimation from the analysis of interaction and behavioural patterns. From the data gathered in a previous experiment we now trained classifiers that allow to assess stress in realtime, in a personalized and empirical way. With these classifiers, we were able to study how stress and conflict coping strategies evolve together. This paper briefly describes these classifiers, focusing afterwards on the results of the experiment.