Determinants of Emotional Experiences in Traffic Situations ... - OPUS

Introducing a Multivariate Model for Predicting Driving Performance 117
drivers are prone to experience stronger anger and as a consequence show more aggressive driving
behaviours. Analysing DAS scores indicate that this was not influenced by any other personal
characteristic. Furthermore, MANOVA Analysis for moderator effects revealed that the DAS-Score
was not a direct predictor of maladaptive driving. Therefore, DAS scores seem to have inferior
predictive validity compared to the measures of state emotion, namely the GEW, in traffic situations.
4.4 General Discussion and Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to reveal the influence of emotions on driving with regard to other personal
characteristics of the driver. Therefore, two studies were conducted with different approaches to
eliciting emotion and various traffic events and driving environments. Both studies showed that anger
and personal characteristics are two distinct factors influencing longitudinal and lateral driving
parameters in specific ways. The first study induced the emotion via short film-clips, which was
successful at the beginning of the experiment, but the effect decreased fast during the experiment,
leaving both groups with similar emotional levels. Yet participants who felt any anger at all due to the
situational characteristics drove faster and accelerated more strongly.
Those results were largely repeated in the second study. The emotional inducement was
changed, so that the traffic event itself should elicit the anger felt. Therefore a slow car, a construction
site, a braking car and a dangerous hole in the street were presented. The emotional intensities were
slightly higher than in study one (Study one: M = 1.09 vs. Study two: M = 1.65). Furthermore, in the
second study anger is positively influenced by driving motivation. Participants who show a high
motivation to drive might be more angered due to the goal blocking nature of the traffic environment.
This led to the assumption that the anger elicited in study one might not have been directly related to
the traffic environment. This idea is supported by the fact that there was no relationship between the
DAS scores and driving anger in study one in contrast to the second study. Therefore, the anger
quality of study one could be described as largely independent of the traffic environment, whereas in
study two it is much more connected to the driving task at hand. In both studies, though, reported
anger levels influenced various driving parameters such as velocity, acceleration and lateral control in
a negative way. This leads to the assumption that anger, regardless of how it is elicited is suitable as a
predictor of a decline in specific performance parameters. This supports the statement by Nesbit and
colleagues (2007), who found in their meta-analysis similar effect sizes between various types of
anger and driving behaviour.
The main effects of driving motivation and gender were strong in both studies, with
participants scoring high on driving motivation showing the same maladaptive behaviour as angered
participants. Even when controlled for anger experienced, they drove faster and showed stronger
lateral acceleration. This supports the frustration-aggression hypothesis of Dollard et al. (1939) and the
assumption that there is a chain reaction starting with the (potentially frustrating) traffic events to the
importance of driving to elicited anger to aggressive driving patterns (Stephens & Groeger, 2009;
Philippe et al., 2009). But as our research indicates, there is another direct route to maladaptive driving
!