  Background: Teamwork, coordination, and communication are a prerequisite for
the timely completion of a software project. Meetings as a facilitator for
coordination and communication are an established medium for information
exchange. Analyses of meetings in software projects have shown that certain
interactions in these meetings, such as proactive statements followed by
supportive ones, influence the mood and motivation of a team, which in turn
affects its productivity. So far, however, research has focused only on certain
interactions at a detailed level, requiring a complex and fine-grained analysis
of a meeting itself.
  Aim: In this paper, we investigate meetings from a more abstract perspective,
focusing on the polarity of the statements, i.e., whether they appear to be
positive, negative, or neutral.
  Method: We analyze the relationship between the polarity of statements in
meetings and different social aspects, including conflicts as well as the mood
before and after a meeting.
  Results: Our results emerge from 21 student software project meetings and
show some interesting insights: (1) Positive mood before a meeting is both
related to the amount of positive statements in the beginning, as well as
throughout the whole meeting, (2) negative mood before the meeting only
influences the amount of negative statements in the first quarter of the
meeting, but not the whole meeting, and (3) the amount of positive and negative
statements during the meeting has no influence on the mood afterwards.
  Conclusions: We conclude that the behaviour in meetings might rather
influence short-term emotional states (feelings) than long-term emotional
states (mood), which are more important for the project.
