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Coordination occurs when 2 or more people do the same or complementary tasks at the same time; it takes several forms. The form of coordination studied here was similar to behavior at a 4-way stop traffic intersection. The performance task involved 12 4-person groups and a special card game. Split-plot analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that coordination rules were implicitly learned and then transferred successfully to new rules of similar difficulty and that coordination can occur without verbal mediation or leadership actions. Transfer of coordination was less positive to a task of greater difficulty. Nonlinear regression showed that fixed-point attractors could be extracted from all learning curves. The difficult shift contained a second chaotic process and a critical utility threshold at which the difficult rule could be mastered or not. Work-group effectiveness has been studied from a variety of perspectives; central themes have included cooperation, cohesion, incentives, task structure, size, and leadership attributes. In this project we focused on the dynamics of group coordination and traced its conceptual origins; here we report new theory, an experiment, and analytic techniques that explore the origins of coordination in groups. Coordination occurs when two or more people do the same or complementary tasks at the same time. Coordination is vital to group effectiveness in situations where a successful outcome for the entire group is the end result of numerous contributions or efforts by all group members and where successful contributions by one participant are contingent on a correct and timely contribution by another participant. Coordination among team members has been recognized as an important correlate of team performance

The study addressed two findings in the creativity literature that show, on the one hand, that bipolar disorder and other clinical dysfunctions are overrepresented among eminently creative people, and that positive affect is positively associated with creativity. The central hypothesis of the study was that emotional intelligence could be an intervening variable between clinical conditions and creative production. A sample of 412 undergraduates completed a wide range of divergent thinking and creative production measures, and the Emotional Intelligence Scale; 11 percent of the sample reported that they had completed treatment for mood disorder and 5 percent report that they were currently in treatment. A combination of regression and ANOVA analyses revealed: The link between mood disorders and creative production persisted after emotional intelligence was statistically removed; the same was true for ideational fluency and flexibility of cognitive style. The link between emotional intelligence and creative production persisted after the effect of clinical disorders was removed. Ideational fluency and emotional intelligence were higher among people who completed treatment compared to people in treatment. The tentative interpretation is that emotional intelligence serves as a counterweight against mood disorders in enhancing creative production.