Our study aims to determine how physiological measures of affect such as heart rate variability and galvanic skin response may be linked to other representations of emotion that arise naturally in text-based communication during online collaboration. Research in this area is important because people increasingly collaborate in a distributed manner across greater distances, and text-based communication is one of the primary means of facilitating these collaborations. The inspiration for this work comes from Aragon and Williams' (2011) paper, which introduces a complex systems model of collaborative creativity and describes ways that affect contributes to this model. In this study, we test and validate the model by using physiological measures to detect and explore the relationship between affect and creativity. Possible outcomes include correlations of creative events with physiological measures of affect and/or the occurrence of affect in chat messages.

During the last ice age the Missoula Floods – huge cataclysmic floods caused by failure of the glacier dam that impounded Lake Missoula, a massive ephemeral meltwater lake – spilled across eastern Washington in periods of a few days. Repeated floods transformed the Eastern Washington landscape, eroding coulees and re-working the resulting sediment into extensive sand, gravel, and boulder deposits. Although widely studied, debate persists over the number and timing of the floods. Flooding is known to have spanned a period of several thousand years; this is constrained by several areas of research including radiocarbon dates, dated volcanic ashes, and examination of the interbedding of Missoula Flood deposits with those of the 18,000 yr BP Bonneville Flood on the Snake River. To further constrain the chronology of flooding, we plan to measure the cosmic ray produced isotope Beryllium-10 in granitic quartz from boulder deposits near Ephrata, and at Priest Rapids on the Columbia River. Concentrations of Be-10, accumulated since the boulders were deposited, will allow us to determine their exposure ages. So far, we have collected several samples from the Ephrata boulder fan and from the Priest Rapids deposit. We have sampled high-standing, water-polished boulders to avoid the effects of past sediment cover and post-depositional erosion, both of which can lead to erroneous age estimates. We have crushed the samples and separated quartz in preparation for Be-10 analysis. After further purification, the quartz will be dissolved for extraction and isotopic analysis of Beryllium. We expect results of this work to better constrain the relative timing of the deposits at Ephrata and Priest Rapids, and the age of the floods that produced them, the last to pass through the Grand Coulee and Sentinel Gap, respectively.