GroupAffect-4: A Multimodal Dataset of Four-Person Collaborative Interaction

TL;DR

GroupAffect-4 is a comprehensive multimodal dataset capturing four-person collaborative interactions with physiological, eye-tracking, audio, and self-report data, enabling advanced affective and social signal analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, multimodal, multi-person dataset with synchronized signals and benchmark targets for analyzing group affect and dynamics in naturalistic tasks.

Findings

High coverage of physiological and eye-tracking data (over 91% and 98%)

Strong task validity confirmed by affective manipulation check

Feasibility baselines established for multiple analysis levels

Abstract

Existing affective-computing, social-signal-processing, and meeting corpora capture important parts of human interaction, but they rarely support analysis of affect in co-located groups as a coupled individual, interpersonal, and group-level process. The required signals (per-participant physiology, eye movement, audio, self-report, task outcomes, and personality) are usually fragmented across separate dataset traditions. We introduce GroupAffect-4, a multimodal corpus of 40 participants in 10 four-person groups, each completing four ecologically varied collaborative tasks spanning information pooling, negotiation, idea generation, and a public-goods game. Each participant is instrumented with a wrist-worn physiology sensor, eye-tracking glasses, and a close-talk microphone; sessions include continuous affect self-reports, post-task questionnaires, task outcomes, and Big-Five personality scores, all time-aligned to a shared clock. The dataset covers over 91% of expected physiology windows and 98% of eye-tracking windows, with strong task validity confirmed by a clear affective manipulation check across the negotiation block. We define fifteen benchmarkable targets spanning three analysis levels -- within-person state, between-person traits, and group dynamics -- and report leave-one-group-out feasibility baselines establishing the dataset's evaluative scope. GroupAffect-4 is released with a BIDS-inspired structure, Croissant metadata, a datasheet, per-session quality reports, and open processing scripts. Code and processing scripts are available at https://github.com/meisamjam/GroupAffect-4; the dataset is publicly archived at https://zenodo.org/records/20037847.