My research is on mood independent programming. Mood do have an impact on different cognitive processes as well as on the physical activities. I am studying the impact of mood on programmer's performance in the testing and debuging capabilities. I am currently a student in the Brunel University. Willem Paul Brinkman is my first supervisor. Professor Rob Hierons is my second supervisor.
The first phase in the research is to test the relationship between programmers mood and their performance. For mood induction we tested and validated different movie clips. These movie clips can be downloaded clicking here. These movie clips were used to induce moods of the programmers. The study was an online study inviting programmers' to take part in it via forums and emails. Programmers performance in different mood conditions was than analyzed. Results inidicated that arousal was significantly have an impact on the programmers performance. However no effect of valence (Degree of happiness and sadness) was found in this study. This test still can be taken. If you are a programmer and over 18, you can also take this test by clicking here.
The hypothesis for the second experiment was that we can measure computer users mood from their use of keyboard and mouse. A background application was developed which was meant to record keypress and mouse click events. The application for this experiment was built using C# dotnet and and can be downloaded here. If you are a frequent computer user then you can still participate in this experiment. More details about this experiment can be found by clicking here.