See with Your Eyes, Hear with Your Ears and Listen to Your Heart: Moving from Dyadic Teamwork Interaction towards a More Effective Team Cohesion and Collaboration in Long-Term Spaceflights under Stressful Conditions

Abstract

The scientific study of teamwork in the context of long-term spaceflight has uncovered a considerable amount of knowledge over the past 20 years. Although much is known about the underlying factors and processes of teamwork, much is left to be discovered for teams who operate in extreme isolation conditions during spaceflights. Thus, special considerations must be made to enhance teamwork and team well-being for long-term missions during which the team will live and work together. Being affected by both mental and physical stress during interactional context conversations might have a direct or indirect impact on team members’ speech acoustics, facial expressions, lexical choices and their physiological responses. The purpose of this article is (a) to illustrate the relationship between the modalities of vocal-acoustic, language and physiological cues during stressful teammate conversations, (b) to delineate promising research paths to help further our insights into understanding the underlying mechanisms of high team cohesion during spaceflights, (c) to build upon our preliminary experimental results that were recently published, using a dyadic team corpus during the demanding operational task of “diffusing a bomb” and (d) to outline a list of parameters that should be considered and examined that would be useful in spaceflights for team-effectiveness research in similarly stressful conditions. Under this view, it is expected to take us one step towards building an extremely non-intrusive and relatively inexpensive set of measures deployed in ground analogs to assess complex and dynamic behavior of individuals.