Conflict Cues in Call Center Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 430

Fig. 20.6 Percentage distribution of turn management labels overlapping with an emotion label

turn managements with respect to the emotional speech units. Turn management
labels that are not associated to emotions are mostly turn transitions (e.g., new topic
introduction, greetings in the end of the conversation).
As far as the distribution of the labels is concerned (cf. Fig. 20.6 ), the findings
are interesting in that labels that are related to interruption points and that may
indicate conflict, such as grab or yield , overlap more with negative than with positive
emotions. A t-test showed the overlaps of negative labels with turn management are
statistically significant for turn grab with p D 0.008, turn yield with p D 0.030, and
turn hold labels with p D 0.031. In particular, the significance of turn hold labels
indicates that the speaker who is being interrupted attempts to hold the turn signaling
a conversational cue related to conflict.
On the other hand, turn management labels related to the normal conversational
flow and regular turn exchanges, i.e., accept and complete , overlap more with
positive emotions. A t-test showed that, in this case, the positive emotional labels'
overlaps are statistically significant for turn accept ( p D 0.003) and turn complete
( p D 0.014).
The reported results provide some evidence with regard to the relation between
turn management labels (representing the rules and their aberrations in terms of how
the exchange of turns is performed) and emotional states expressed by the speakers,
indicating the whereabouts of potential conflict points within the conversational
structure. Before generalizing though, these findings need to be further investigated
and compared to other audio files categories, such as the welcome calls, where
the distribution and the correlation between emotion and turn management labels
remain to be explored.