Date of Award

8-2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Applied Psychology

Committee Chair/Advisor

Muth, Eric R

Committee Member

Hoover , Adam

Committee Member

Switzer , Fred

Abstract

Physiological compliance (PC) refers to the correlation between physiological measures of team members over time. The first goal of the current analyses was to generate several means to measure PC from heart rate variability (HRV) data. A second goal was to examine the relationship between PC and team performance during a building clearing task performed by 4-man teams. Teams were tasked with entering and clearing both real and simulated rooms populated with combatants (individuals with a weapon) and non-combatants (individuals without a weapon). Teams had to eliminate (shoot with a laser tag or simulated weapon) combatants and identify non-combatants (verbally or with a joystick). In Analysis I, linear correlation and directional agreement were shown to be the most sensitive PC measures when combined with HRV data. For Analysis II, 10 teams (20 subjects total, all male) were split into low and high performance groups based on their average team velocity and percentage of non-combatants acknowledged. Multivariate tests revealed a statistically significant difference between high a low performers, indicating that high, or better, performing teams tend to have higher PC. In Analysis III, one team was chosen to examine the relationship of performance and PC over time. Correlation testing on HRV data revealed a significant positive relationship between correlation RSA and performance (r=.853) and between correlation loge RSA and performance (r=.859). These results suggest that PC may have merit for predicting team performance in a dynamic task. However, further research is needed.

Included in

Psychology Commons

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