Enhancing Emotion Management in Construction Projects: Multimodal Research on the Impact Mechanisms of Typical Stimuli

Existing studies have shown that intense emotional fluctuations adversely affect safety management performance of construction project employees, but the impact of typical stimuli on employees’ emotions and the mechanisms remain unclear. Moreover, emotion management is still a relatively weak link in construction project safety training. This study investigates the impact of typical stimuli in construction projects on emotional responses and underlying mechanisms. Drawing on three pivotal dimensions influencing project performance, including finance, leadership and process, six typical stimuli were selected. Participants completed laboratory experiments involving immersive video-based stimulus exposure, with electroencephalogram (EEG) and emotional signal recordings. The results show that there are significant differences in the impact of various stimuli on emotions. Interestingly, the stimuli most strongly inducing positive and negative emotions do not belong to the same factor. Timely salary payment (finance) and project accident occurrence (process) respectively most strongly induce positive and negative emotions. Additionally, various stimuli affect emotional valence by influencing participants’ cognitive load, i.e., cognitive load has a significant mediating effect. Also, emotion regulation ability (ERA) regulates the impact of various stimuli on emotional valence, i.e., ERA has a moderating effect. This study improved the emotion management theory in construction projects and proposed an embodied intelligence-based full-cycle emotion management framework, offering valuable insights for optimizing safety training and project management.